Blog homeThe other day I listed 16 top travel websites (mainly online travel agents) and wondered if anyone could guess how they were ordered.
Here are the sites again - but this time with their total number of pages listed alongside:
Group A
- Travel.yahoo.com: 10,000,000
- Tripadvisor.com: 8,800,000
- Hotels.com: 6,250,000
Group B
- Expedia.com: 900,000
- Priceline.com: 840,000
- Travelocity.com: 740,000
- Laterooms.com : 670,000
- Lastminute.com: 500,000
Group C
- Kayak: 400,000
- Dohop.com: 320,000
- Cheapflighs.com: 300,000
- Ebookers.com: 200,000
- Boo.com: 149,000
- Cheaptickets.com : 148,000
- Hotwire.com: 140,000
- Orbitz.com: 117,000
The number has come from searching for site:domain.com and then recording the number Google reports on their results page. It doesn’t quite take into account various regional domain names (unless they are on sub-domains of the primary site)…. but it will do for a back of the envelope calculation.
Why does having a large page count help?
It mainly helps for two key reasons:
- It gives you more “attack surface” and more chances that a page is going to be exactly focussed on what a customer is looking for
- Due to the way the Google page rank algorithm works, by having thousands (millions) of pages all linking to the homepage (or other page you want to rank highly) this may give that single page a better ranking
i.e. it is about SEO
Staggering
I am amazed by the number of pages leading websites now have. There are about 150,000 to 250,000 hotels that are worth putting on a travel website (I made that number up before anyone asks for a source)…. and therefore many online travel sites can quite easily get to 300,000 to 500,000 pages (Group C).
It takes a bit more skill to get into Group B….. as you need to be a bit more creative with your page generation strategies.
To get into Group A you probably need to have some form of User Generated Content…..
Travolution asked the other day what Kayak’s new MD Europe / Asia needs to focus on (see article) - personally, if in that position, I would be looking to double or perhaps treble their page count…..
Have I missed out any multi-million page travel websites? [Group A]
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Hi Alex,
Man, I was sure I was onto something with 2 column layouts…
The problem for generating pages based on hotel descriptions is that there is so much duplicated content between sites (the same hotel description is on 10 sites) which means that even though G will index your pages, they might not appear in the search results.
Travel forums are great - all UGC
aardvarktravel.net - 182,000
fodors.com - 348,000
and the big one
lonelyplanet.com - 2,780,000
Alex,
following on from Gath, I guess that some sites have more pages than that and so it will depend on what Google decides to index.
But as Google is the dominant source of traffic for most websites, getting as many pages listed on Google has got to be the trick. There are several ways that Google will include pages in it’s index, unique content, valid links, etc…..
You could say that Kayak need to treble their pages indexed on Google. They may (I don’t know this) have 1,200,000 pages already, just that the pages are not valid enough for Google.
Is there anyone from Kayak (or the other companies) that can confirm how many pages they do have?
This is such a useless statistic, it’s almost laughable!
Did you factor in that search engine robots don’t count dynamic pages? While having a very flat layout helps a lot with total number of pages (the only value of this is for search engine optimization), it’s terrible from a usability perspective. What the user wants is a page which specific information tailored to that individual, with snippets of information from various areas that would require a 50 page traverse on yahoo or tripadvisor. Thus, trip-adivsor is now held hostage to Google as the primary way it’s customers can find information on it’s site.
Trip-advisor is no longer the entry point for it’s customers, Google is. There is nothing worse in business than forcing your customers through a gatekeepr to use your service effectively. If Google decides tomorrow that a competitors page is better, you’ve lost the customer.
Its an interesting comment about your customers being forced through Google. However, any business still has the opportunity to market itself direct to its customers and of course should. Googles importance though means that ‘presentation’ in google now gets a high priority.
Just to pick up on the comment on dynamic content, becuase you make it with strong conviction… A page can be dynamic provided the copy is rendered in the html of the page. Then you have fresh text each time the page is loaded. Flat pages will just land you with one hell of a maintenance problem to keep it all current.
Hi Alehandro,
Thanks for your comment - to quote your other comment on the previous post
“If you just swapped Expedia and priceline, they would be ranked by EBITA.
If you moved Priceline into the bottom of group A, they would be ranked by technology cap ex as a percent of sales”
Hence, don’t you find it interesting that a very basic back of the envelope page count correlates with real world financial figures. I am not sure how this makes these page counts laughable.
Thanks. Alex
You asked for some reference statistics. I am SEO guy at Orbitz and I confirm that we have MANY more pages than 117,000 on our site. As in, more than 5 times this amount.
Now, how many of those pages are reasonable landing pages for search engine traffic is a different question and a difficult number to compute.
To address the question of whether more is actually always better, I think the issue is more complex than just “more is better”. For instance, even though we have a landing page for Miami car rentals and Las Vegas hotels, our home page frequently ranks better than these pages that are specfically focused on these keywords in the content, URLs, title and meta tags.
Hi Matt
Thanks for your stats. Interesting to see that Google reports a number that is quite different to reality.
That would still leave you with less pages than some of the others….. but I expect that having fewer, better quality pages would out compete lots of spammy ones.
I dunno….!
…. and Alehandro, the purpose of these statistics wasn’t to write an academic paper on it….but to generate a conversation about the size of leading travel websites…. hence I am happy with the method I used to research these numbers.
A correction on the dynamic content issue above, search engines have no problem indexing database driven sites as long as there are not too many parameters and duplicate pages. See http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34431 and http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=76329 for more details.
[…] Organic search traffic is fine - but won’t deliver sufficient visitors to support 3 senior jobs (and a complex site requiring premium web developers). There are only 10,000 pages on the site (in the Google index) vs hundreds of thousands that you find on the more mature travel OTA sites. Perhaps the metabook model also created such slim margins that Pay Per Click (PPC) couldn’t give any ROI. […]