buuteeq

How to produce compelling content that can put your hotel in the spotlight.

Content marketing is quickly becoming a tired buzz-word in the SEO community. It is such a popular topic because it is one of the only SEO strategies that works well and is unlikely to be penalized by Google in the future. Despite being a buzz-word, content marketing is something we should all focus on for the foreseeable future to improve our SEO.

Instead of calling content marketing an “SEO strategy”, I should really call it a “marketing strategy”, because producing quality content and marketing it well is simply good online marketing. It helps with SEO, but more importantly, it gives guests quality information, increases your hotel’s visibility, establishes you as a thought leader in your niche, and encourages guests to trust you, making them more likely to book a room with you.

But, as is the nature with buzz-words, “content marketing” is kind of hard to understand. What does it even mean? Well here, let me give you an example.

Yesterday, The Washington Post released a timeline of the ongoing IRS scandal called “Who Knew What, When”. It’s a simple timeline, pulling information from freely available news sources, organized into a visual timeline of events. It’s basically a glorified Excel spreadsheet.

Click to enlarge.

This timeline was easy to make. The information already existed. All The Washington Post had to do was collect it, organize it, and summarize it, while their dev team whipped up a simple interactive timeline.

Their results are impressive. In less than 24 hours, this one article has picked up over 100 comments, over 380 Facebook likes and shares, and has been tweeted over 175 times.

This example of content marketing is great because it was made using freely available information, it was easy to produce, and no one had done it yet. Hotel marketers can do the same thing. They just have to be creative.

True, The Washington Post example was in the news vertical, but the principles work equally well for hospitality too. Swissôtel Hotels & Resorts wanted to create some compelling content their guests would find interesting, so they contacted SEO Gadget, who produced an interactive Ultimate Guide to Worldwide Etiquette, which you can see here. Guests choose a country, and the map then shows them the appropriate etiquette for that country concerning tipping, gestures like handshaking and kissing cheeks, dining customs (think “elbows on the table”), and other dos and don’ts for the specified culture.

This piece of content has been online for much longer than The Washington Post article, which helps explain why it has over 2,100 Facebook likes, 620 Twitter tweets, 340 Google +1s, and has been shared on Stumble Upon an astounding 20,000 times. Open Site Explorer shows that this one article has over 300 backlinks from 90 different domains

Click to enlarge.

Quality content that provides guests with actionable, useful information is evergreen—that is, it remains popular long after first being published, and has a great chance of going “viral”.

Ideas for Your Hotel

So then, we come down to the hard task before us. What kind of content can you make for your unique hotel that has this kind of viral-like potential? You know your property and your area better than I do. Sit down with your staff and family members, and brainstorm some ideas. Here are some to get you started:

• A guide to local customs and sayings.
• A timeline of historical events that happened in your area.
• A weekend trip plan, where you create an agenda of things your guests can do in your area over 2 days.
• A guide to spending less than $50 a day in your area while still seeing amazing things and eating great food.
• A guide to windsurfing, skiing, skydiving, snorkeling, in your area, with directions on who to contact for gear, which places offer the best sights, etc.

Once you have your topic, decide what kind of content you will produce–an infographic, a video, a calendar, a spreadsheet, a map. It could be a simple article, but make sure it is chocked-full of photography and, if appropriate, maps and illustrations.

If you’re not the creative type, you can contact a vendor to write content, take photos, or produce images and infographics for you. We have a list of buuteeq-approved Validated Vendors you can explore. We go to local Killer Infographics to help produce our infographics.

I hope this article helped explain the importance of content marketing for today’s SEO, and gave you some good ideas! Sound off in the comments below if you have any questions.

Each week, the buuteeq team scours the web for the latest news and trends in hospitality, marketing, and tech that hoteliers need to know about to be successful.

Here are the must-read articles you may have missed last week:

1) Google+ Redesign Looks a Lot Like Facebook, Pinterest

2) Top 5 Hotel SEO Mistakes

3) Social Media Strategies: Show, Don’t Tell

4) Writing Content For Responsive Design

5) Is Your Social Network a Puppy or a Dog?

6) Google Tests Hotel Search Campaign with Lots of Photos

7) How Long Does a Brand Last?

8) Mobile Payments Get Serious on Google as Wallet Evolves to Handle Travel

9) HotelTonight Launches A More Visual (And Less Review-y) Take On Hotel Reviews

Google’s search wizard Matt Cutts released a short video explaining the 5 most frequent SEO mistakes made by website owners and SEOs. Here they are, in order:

1) Failure to have a website, or making it invisible to Google robots. Some hoteliers have told me that having a directory listing, or a micro-site on a franchise or brand page, is enough. But clearly, Google wants to see a unique, individual web presence for each business, which means building a domain and building a hotel website for each property you own.

2) Not including the right words on the page. This is a great one, and simply means that you should write about what your guests are searching for. If you’re hotel is in Boca Raton, be sure to have articles about your hotel in Boca Raton Florida, and write articles on your website like “Top 10 Things to Do in Boca Raton, Florida”.

3) Link-building, instead of building compelling content and marketing your website. The philosophy behind this is that if you build your hotel’s reputation online, you’ll end up building quality links as a natural consequence. But if you focus solely on link-building, then you’ll miss an opportunity to build a reputation and online awareness for your hotel–and, you’ll likely attain low-quality links that could actually harm your website. In short, focus on people, not links.

4) Not thinking about the titles and descriptions of your important pages. These are the meta title and description tags that you can edit yourself using buuteeq’s Cloud DMS, if you’re a subscriber. One of the first places Google inspects on your website is your title tag, to see what your website is about, and then your description tag to offer a short, pithy, enticing description to users in their search engine. Write a meta title that accurately says what the page is about, and that includes the appropriate keywords you’re trying to rank for (in example, “My Florida Hotel – Boutique Hotel in Boca Raton Florida” might be an appropriate meta title tag. Even though Google doesn’t rank your website based on what it finds in your meta description, it still may choose to show users this description. This makes your description tag an unique opportunity to convince users in your own words to click on your website. Use it well!

5) Failure to use Google Webmaster Tools (WMT) and other webmaster resources. WMT is Google’s direct connection to you, as I explain in my guide to Webmaster Tools for hotels. It’s what they use to communicate with you when they’ve detected an unnatural link profile on your website, for example, or if they discover that your content has suddenly gone offline due to a webmaster outage. It can provide you or your webmaster will important info about how Google sees your website, so you can make the appropriate changes.

This list is a reminder to us all that, while we could spend days, weeks, or even months tweaking little things here and there, the major issues that impact our websites the most are obvious and relatively easy to fix. While it may be a fun hobby to research the inner-most workings of Google’s algorithm and making experimental changes to our websites to one-up competitors, our time is best spent elsewhere.

See the video below for Matt’s complete comments.

Top 5 SEO Mistakes

Each week, the buuteeq team scours the web for the latest news and trends in hospitality, marketing, and tech that hoteliers need to know about to be successful.

Here are the must-read articles you may have missed last week:

1) buuteeq Teams Up with Choice Hotels International

2) Snickers Catches Bad Spellers With Smart Google Ads

3) Back to basics – Four essentials for any mobile travel strategy

4) The 5 Rules to Pitching a Guest Blog

5) 10 Signs Your Old Marketing Tactics Aren’t Working

6) 18 Sweet Tips For Facebook Page Posts

7) U.S. hotels have given up on extra fees, raising room rates instead

8) TripAdvisor steps up process to include more genuine reviews of hotels

9) Industry first alert: Google teams up with Hilton brand DoubleTree for interactive YouTube channel

Last Friday, buuteeq was honored to have Rob Torres, Google’s Travel Marketing Manager, speak at length about Google Hotel Finder, Google+, Google Glass, and a number of other Google topics.

He took a lively Q&A from interested buuteeq employees, revealing some interesting tid-bits:

• Google has no plans to give hoteliers and hotel marketers direct access to Hotel Price Ads, which gives access to the Hotel Finder auction.
• Google believes that Google Flight Explorer performs better than competitors like Hipmunk.
• Google has no plans to process actual flight and hotel reservations.
• YouTube is the biggest ‘cable’ network for 18-34 year olds.
• Maps is one of Google’s most popular products, and is responsible for many travel referrals
• Google +1s can help increase a website’s quality score, and also the quality score of a Hotel Finder listing.
• In LATAM, video is first. They are the largest users of video on YouTube.

Watch the video here:

Transcript Coming Soon!

There was once a time when hotel marketing focused on brochures, newspaper listings, magazine ads, banners, and lots of printed paper. Things have changed, and print media is less effective at driving new bookings as it once was. Today, it can be hard for hoteliers to learn how to acquire new guests aside from turning on a flickering ‘vacancy’ light in the window.

This problem is exacerbated as guests move away from more traditional hospitality customer acquisition channels, in favor of more accessible digital channels. In this whitepaper, we will explore the primary acquisition channels used today by the most successful hoteliers and hotel marketers around the world.

►Download the Free Whitepaper

We’re excited to introduce a new series on the buuteeq blog: Must-read Monday! Each week, the buuteeq team scours the web for the latest news and trends in hospitality, marketing, and tech that hoteliers need to know about to be successful.

Here are the must-read articles you may have missed last week:

1) WordPress is Nipping at Your Vertical: Restaurants, Weddings, and Now Hotels

2) How Do Colors Affect Purchases?

3) A Hotelier’s Guide to Google Webmaster Tools

4) Prepare Your Hotel for Penguin 2.0

5) Fewer Travelers Lug Laptops to Hotels, More Bring iPads

6) The 10 Most Clickable Twitter Headlines

7) Hotel Online Marketing Budget Disconnect: A Perpetual Case of Bringing a Knife to a Gunfight

8) Vacationing Americans Prefer Giving Up Booze Over Mobile Devices

9) 3-Step Guide to Google Hotel Finder

Buying a website is expensive, outdated, and even dangerous. Buying project based web services or static software is the way of the past, and is already being usurped by software as a service, which is cheaper, up-to-date, and more secure—simply more efficient.

Think of software subscriptions like your home utilities—a concept I covered to some extend in my previous article on utility computing. We shouldn’t make one-time purchases of software or web services for the same reason we don’t hire men with shovels to dig us wells. Purchasing water as a subscription from the water company is easier, cheaper, and faster—simply more efficient.

The marketing team here at buuteeq just finished directing this excellent infographic by the fine folks at Killer Infographics, exploring the journeys of hoteliers going the agency route compared to the SaaS route. I elaborated more on this after the jump.

Agencies vs. SaaS – Which Path Would You Pick?

Click on image to enlarge.

What is SaaS?

The old model of crafting a website, shipping it, and then moving on to the next thing, is long outdated. Software developers are also shying away from the ‘buy an upgrade’ method. Instead, they’re selling software as a subscription, and then offering updates to their clients for free, over time, as technology evolves. This method, called Software as a Service (SaaS), keeps software up-to-date and adapted to the day’s latest tech trends and necessary integrations—something traditional software can’t achieve without expensive, time-consuming software patches and upgrades.

Give me some context, please.

In the late 90s, I worked as a sales rep for Comp USA, a big box computer store that I believe is out of business today. Back then, half the store was dedicated to selling software in boxes. I remember when Internet Explorer 5 was released—our shelves were filled with the browser in boxes. You had to buy Internet browsers back then, a concept which is ridiculous today since they’re all free.

Anyway, take a look at the boxed software section the next time you’re in Best Buy. Pretty tiny, isn’t it? You’ll likely find a slew of hastily made video games, or useless productivity software made irrelevant by free Google Chrome apps. Anything substantial can be found online.

Instead of buying tax software in a box, people login to TaxAct online, which is already updated with the latest tax regulations in time for the next tax season. Instead of buying the latest boxed set of Blizzard games, many people download and install them from Battle.net. When the next update is available for, say, World of Warcraft, gamers automatically download upgrades for free the next time they log in, because they’re still paying for the subscription.

Recently, Adobe switched to the SaaS business model for their praised creative products. As a video editor and animator, I’ve been a huge fan of Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects since I started animating in 2005. My one gripe has always been that each year there was a new version of each product, introducing new functionality I would never enjoy unless I forked over $thousands for a complete upgrade. Last year, Adobe solved this problem by launching the Adobe Creative Cloud. For one monthly fee, I now have access to every product in the Creative Suite, always updated with the latest animating innovations, as long as I maintain my subscription. When asked to explain this radical business shift, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen quipped:

“Companies that simply try to preserve the status quo will fail.”

A Simple Subscription

Historically, hotels have been forced to pay tens of thousands of dollars for a new website. This steep cost has forced many hoteliers to pay for incremental upgrades, costing hundreds of dollars hourly, or to not update their website at all. I recently saw a hotel website urging viewers to install Internet Explorer 5, a 14 year old web browser, and then come back, because that’s the browser it was designed best to work in.

Instead, SaaS for hotel online marketing keeps up with technology so hoteliers don’t have to, upgrading their software and delivering it to their subscribers at no additional cost. This saves hoteliers time, money, and is far safer.

Simply, more efficient.

---

Infographic Transcript

DON’T ROLL THE DICE ON YOUR DIGITAL MARKETING

Which path would you pick to get your dream site up on time and on budget?

Agency Avenue

• High hopes and lofty promises. Advance 1 space.
• Explain your vision. Advance 2 spaces.
• Waiting for response…
• WARNING: Fees ahead! Pay in full upfront, lose a turn.
• Inquire about mobile features. Pay extra, roll the dice.
• Ask for updates. Advance 1 space.
• Waiting for a response. Roll the dice.
• See first draft…but it’s a WordPress site. Lose 5 morale points, advance 1 space.
• Request changes. Pay out-of-scope fees, lose a turn.
• Waiting for changes. Roll doubles to receive them.
• See revisions… they’re not what you asked for. Lose 10 morale points, roll the dice.
• Clarify your vision, again. Pay out-of-scope fees, move back 1 space.
• Clarify your vision again. Move back 2 spaces.
• Clarify…seriously?! Lose patience, but push forward 1 space.
• Get email from new contact. Lose remaining morale, but tiptoe ahead 1 space.
• New contact asks for your vision again… Trudge ahead 1 space.
• Lose your investment, time, and sanity.

buuteeq Boulevard

• Your vision is understood! Advance 1 space.
• buuteeq’s full content management system means you avoid the development stage entirely. Advance 2 spaces.
• No development necessary.
• Preview your site; changes are quick and easy.
• Optimized for mobile devices.
• Live and lookin’ good! Advance 1 space.
• Break even in just 4 weeks. Advance 1 space. (This is the typical experience of a buuteeq customer).
• See clear analytics. Advance 1 space.
• 24/7 access to customer success team. Advance 1 space.
• buuteeq’s customer success team has a 95% satisfaction rating.
• Finished… time to celebrate! Morale and budget intact.

Hoteliers using buuteeq’s Cloud DMS see a 1-5% growth in unique visitors year over year.

Our site bounce rates are just 30-40% (compared to an industry average of 50-60%)

Subscription software platform updated 2 times monthly.

Hoteliers see a 1-2% minimum booking conversion increase with a buuteeq powered site.

You keep 100% of money made using our booking engine.

The path is clear: buuteeq is invested in your success, every step of the way.

Last week we co-hosted a very successful joint webinar with our friends at Revinate. During this hour long session we identified key features that every hotel website needs to have to drive direct bookings, why featuring negative reviews on your site will help your business, and much more. For those unable to attend, here is a recording of the webinar and the presentation deck is available below.

If you have any questions regarding Revinate’s platform, please reach out to info@revinate.com.

Hotel websites are still recovering from last year’s Penguin update, but a new update loosely called ‘Penguin 2.0’ by the industry is looming on the horizon. Now is the time hotel marketers must make changes to their website SEO to prevent any penalties that might be levied by Penguin 2.0. While no one knows for certain what will be in Google’s upcoming update, here are a few likely scenarios you can prepare for.

First, Some Context

Last year, Google released an update to their algorithm called Penguin, which severely penalized websites that practice bad SEO. Tragically, hotel websites were some of the worst hit by these penalties, as hoteliers have a history of paying unscrupulous SEO agencies to ‘do’ SEO for them. Hoteliers are therefore vulnerable to be penalized by upcoming penalties, unless hoteliers change their SEO strategies and move away from vendors whose techniques are outdated.

Soon, Google will update Penguin, and eventually incorporate it into their broader algorithm. Google’s head of web spam Matt Cutts spilled the beans about the looming update when he commented on a popular SEO blog:

“…expect that the next few Penguin updates will take longer, incorporate additional signals, and as a result will have more noticeable impact.” (Emphasis mine)

In other recent interviews, Cutts said the updates will be “jarring and jolting”, and to those looking forward to the next Penguin update, “You don’t want the next Penguin update”.

8 Steps to Prepare Your Hotel for Penguin 2.0

Note: I am indebted to many thought leaders in the SEO industry, including Search Engine Watch, QuickSprout, and State of Search for performing excellent SEO research and giving me much to think about when composing this guide.

Also note: No one truly knows what Google plans to do. This guide is a prediction of what Google will likely focus on with Penguin 2.0, based on intuition, industry discussions, and public statements from Google.

1 ) Manipulated Links

As Google’s technology advances, they become increasingly sophisticated at discovering manipulated backlinks. Google valued backlinks in the first place only because backlinks are harder to ‘game’ compared to other outdated SEO techniques, like meta tags. But, like Google’s use of meta keywords tags, Google will rely on backlinks less and less with each algorithm update. It’s quite possible that someday, Google won’t place any value on backlinks at all.

For Penguin 2.0, the only links Google will value are links placed with editorial intent—that is, placed with purpose because they give benefit to the reader.

Google can easily detect where links appear on a page, and they may discount the following kinds of links completely:

• Site-wide navigation links, including footer and sidebar links
• Links in author signatures
• Links in blog comments
• Links in forum signatures
• Links in author profiles
• Sponsored links
• Blogroll links
• Links from embedded media, like apps, widgets, images, infographics, and video
• Generic boiler-plate links
• Article directories
• Links from press releases
• Much more

Click on image to enlarge.

In the image above, we see that the majority of backlinks for this website come from forum signatures (dark blue), blog comments (teal), and short text paragraphs (pink), which are conspicuous of purchased links and ‘spun’ content. We also see that links from more trusted websites found further out in the disc are from public sites like YouTube and Blogspot which are easy to obtain links from, while the rest of the website’s links come from poorly trusted websites further into the disk (notice how dense the center of the disk becomes). If I can find rich data like this about a hotel website’s manipulated backlink strategy, how easier can Google?

In short, if Google can detect a link was not consciously placed by the author as an editorial comment, reference or source in the body of the article, then Google will disavow the link.

Action Item: Don’t pay for backlinks. If you have paid for backlinks in the past, verify that none of the links you received were from these low-quality websites. If you have links from these kinds of websites, you may want to have them removed.

2) Domain Trust

If a website repeatedly practices suspicious linking, then Google will decrease the domain authority they give to that website over time. Websites like this are easy to detect, as they have characteristics similar with each other–call it a low-quality finger print. If Google sees that the majority of your website’s backlinks come from low quality sites like these, then they may conclude you’re buying backlinks.

Google will likely publish strict penalties with Panda 2.0, to penalize websites they have caught receiving links from ‘bad neighborhoods’, or sending links to them.

Click on image to enlarge.

In the above example, we see that the majority of backlinks this website has come from websites with low authority. The dots on the outer edge of the spiral are websites with higher authority. Notice how few there are. The closer the dots get towards the middle of the spiral, the lower authority these websites have. Hovering over one of the dots, we see the kind of poor quality, unrelated websites this hotel has backlinks from: this one is a public forum for free video games. (I’ve blurred out part of the anchor text and website URL as I’m not in the business to out people for their shady SEO.)

Action Item: If you actively build backlinks for your hotel website, make sure you only solicit high quality websites that are thought leaders in your niche. If your agency has solicited low quality links, try to have them removed.

3) Social Signals

Google has been using social signals to supplement backlinks as a way to judge a website’s quality for some time now. But even social signals like Facebook likes can be ‘gamed’, or purchased, and Google is getting increasingly better at detecting them.

In the example above, we see a cluster of one website’s Facebook likes, broken into different clusters. Each gray dot represents one person who liked the website, and the lines represent connections to other people who have liked the content.

The left side of the cluster looks normal. The page has likes from various people, who are connected to each other through long chains of interlinking friends. A healthy social graph will depict an interlinking web of likes from friends connected to other people through various degrees of removal, whom the website author has never met.

On the right, we see some suspicious activity. We find four big lumps of likes from people only connected to friends within small groups. These four groups connect with each other, but very few of them connect with the larger web to the left. This is highly suspicious, as it is unlikely for there to be a community of friends connected to each other but have no connection with other people outside their click. That is, the people who liked the page are all friends with each other only, and have few friends outside those circles. This makes sense, because it is unlikely for a real person on Facebook to send a friend request to a fake Facebook account created by a robot to give likes to a website.

Google could use data like this to help detect spam, and penalize websites.

Since Google does not have access to all the data 3^rd-party social websites like Facebook and Twitter have, Google created their own social network, Google+. It is likely that Google will put greater trust on social signals from Google+ in the future, over all other social networks, as they continue to aggressively encourage users to adopt their new social network. They will do this because they have access to all the social networking data from users of their network, which gives them an easy way to detect suspicious activity from fake Google accounts. This will give Google the ability to reliably place trust and value on +1s (the Google equivalent of a Facebook ‘like’) and Google+ social shares while weeding out the chaff.

Action item: Optimize your hotel website to accept Google +1s (see my guide to +1s for more info). Use the social network to build up a community of Google+ users with whom to share hotel information.

4) Authorship

Google has clearly said they will give greater weight to content tied to verified online identities compared to anonymous content. Google can verify authorship though Google+ and verified Twitter profiles, but Google probably will rely more and more on Google+ authorship in the future as that network becomes more mature. Hotel websites will receive a boost in the rankings if they are tied to a verified online identity. Read our guide to Google+ for hotels and our article on setting up Google+ authorship and publisher markup for more information.

Action Item: Make sure Google+ authorship is installed correctly.

5) Relevancy

For a long time now, Google has warned us that getting a slew of links from a random assortment of websites might not be the best idea, as they give greater weight to links from websites in your niche. With Panda 2.0, they probably will become stricter with the authority they give to backlinks from non-relevant websites.

Click image to enlarge.

In the above example we see this hotel website gets many of their backlinks from article directories (pink), blog comments (green), and, tightly packed towards the center of the spiral, low quality web directories (red). Instead, a healthy backlink profile would have the majority of these coming from travel related websites, personal blogs, university websites, corporate websites, news websites, and search engines.

Action Item: Discover the kinds of websites your backlinks come from. If the majority come from article directories, blog comments, or other un-related websites, consider having them removed.

6) Rich Anchor Text

Links with rich or ‘exact-match’ anchor text are links on a website made from words that exactly match the search engine query the recipient hopes to rank for. The idea goes that a hotel website will get 100 backlinks with anchor text that says ‘great Seattle hotels’. Google will index these links, see that the hotel website is relevant to ‘great Seattle hotels’, and then rank the hotel website well for that keyphrase.

This type of manipulation was all but killed with Penguin last year, and it was a lesson learned hard. This, more than anything, was the cause for so many hotel websites being severely penalized or even completely removed from Google’s index. While having some rich anchor text is still good for a website, the majority of backlinks should have the hotel brand name, or generic phrases like ‘click here’ to be deemed safe and ‘natural’.

Recent reports indicate Google is reducing the percentage of rich anchor text backlinks that are acceptable. With Panda 2.0, we could see even more websites fall out of the index or get penalized for having backlinks with rich anchor text.

Action Item: If your website has paid backlinks, or links from friends, family, or colleagues that include rich anchor text, ask them to replace the anchor text with something safer, like your hotel brand name.

7) Traffic Metrics

Metrics that demonstrate how popular and interesting your website is have always been a part of the Google algorithm, but they were emphasized with Google Panda. Now, the way your viewers act on your website can determine how well it ranks.

Google will look at how quickly your website loads, how long guests stay on your website, their ‘bounce rate’, how much of your content is read, how many broken links your website has, and so on. Now more than ever, it is essential to perfect the technical side of your website’s SEO.

Action Item: If your website is outdated or hasn’t been touched for years, it’s important to check on it—it may need to be rebuilt. Partnering with a digital marketing system is a smart move, as they will make sure your website is always up-to-date and innovative.

8) Co-Citations / Co-Occurrence

Google using co-citations is a theory that websites can obtain authority from other websites even when they aren’t linked to by those websites, based on mentions, and links from other websites in the network. This can be a tad complicated, but I’ll try to explain with diagrams.

Above, hotel A is linking to both B & C (blue arrow). Hotel B is linking to hotel A. But even though hotel B is not linking to hotel C, B is giving C a co-citation (black arrow) because of its reciprocal relationship to A. That is, Google connects C’s relationship to B through A and B’s mutual relationship.

Above, hotel A and hotel C are linking to each other only. However, both websites are talking about hotel C, by mentioning hotel C in a blog article where they link to each other, for example. Hotel C gets a co-citation from each website, even though there are no actual links.

Here, no one is actually linking to anyone. However, each website mentions one of the others. By citing each other, Google can figure out there is a connection between them all, and pass along co-citations where necessary.

It’s possible that Google is resorting to alternative trust indicators like co-citations to convey website and article authority, and rank content.

Action Item: Continue to develop thought leadership in your niche using advertisements, creating deals, guest blogging, and developing relationships with leaders in your niche, in order to get people talking about you. Even if they don’t give you backlinks, your website may still receive a ranking benefit simply by being cited by other websites in your niche.

Conclusion

Google Penguin has always been designed to take-out sites that use manipulative techniques to improve search ranking. As long as your efforts improve content quality to benefit guests with better information, there is little to worry about. If, however, you have used SEO agencies in the past that proved unreliable, or to have used black-hat tactics, then you may have some work cut out for you to prepare for Penguin 2.0.