Tnooz: "Organic search results for travel almost dead on Google"

Kevin May at Tnooz posted an interesting article yesterday: “Organic search results for travel almost dead on Google.”

According to May, Google announced this week that it would change the way that users see “place” search results.

He includes a graphic that highlights the way that paid advertisements dominate the organic search page.

And he notes that “there is a worry that much of the linkage around Universal Search (which seemingly dominates many of the pages) may – repeat, may – eventually go the way of paid-for advertising elsewhere on the Google real estate.”

What you may not have seen was that May’s original post was taken down for a few hours and revised.

What was deleted from the original ?  (Emphasis ours)

“The majority of the real estate is devoted to paid or bookable actions. When a user clicks into the place page or reviews near the star rating they land on a Google content page.

“More bookable actions would occur via CPC. If this deploys to the Googlesphere organic SEO for hotels is all but dead.”

One unnamed search analyst for a high-profile European digital marketing agency says other similar, “radical” tests have been seen recently on Google.

“This forces brands to consider Google as a content destination as well as a search provider. Google Places may well be significant in this. It’s not surprising Google is doing this, its long been predicted Google would expand Universal Search into a polymorphic vertical search.

“What is surprising is that they’re testing this now while the ITA spotlight is shining on them.”

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.