Beating the TripAdvisor Badge’s SEO Tactic
The Problem
Recently, I got a reference to this article from my Product Manager, regarding TripAdvisor badges and how they boost SEO. Their secret is a simple link that links deep into TripAdvisor website and makes your site a donor of link love to TripAdvisor. This is somewhat bad for hotel owners who might find that TripAdvisor trumps the search ranking for their brand name.
The easy solution to prevent that from happening would be to slightly edit TA widget and use a rel="nofollow" attribute in the anchor that links to TripAdvisor. The clever guys at TA, though, have a JavaScript check that disables the widget if you try to do this. Well, how about we turn their own trick on to them?