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Comment by MichaelTieso | Hacker News Reader

Just a few emails I usually get from Expedia.

"In fact, the article can be about any topic related to your blog, just mentioning at some point something like “find coupon codes for Expedia”, “get some deals in Expedia”.. Do you think that would fit in? Doesn’t have to look very spammy (we don’t want that either). What do you think?

About the price, how much would it be a post like this with maybe 2 links? "

AND

"I’m looking to place a link this week on the homepage, but can I ask when the link for expedia.co.uk expires on your site?"

These are just two examples. There are plenty of these. BUT it does appear that they are now hiring quality bloggers to write on their own blog so perhaps things have changed.

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Isn't this very similar to what RapGenius just got penalized for? Only difference seems to be Expedia is not providing anything in exchange for the crappy linkbit like RG was offering to.

Yes, this is similar but more sophisticated. With RapGenius, taking action was easy because the company admitted what they were doing and all the evidence was in the open. Also, the links were clearly spammy.

With these examples, the links are clearly spammy to a human but a little less detectable by a bot. And -- this is crucial -- there is no evidence yet linking these bloggers back to Expedia. Google will have to do a little more digging to figure out the nexus and analyze the quality of Expedia's backlink profile before they can slap a penalty. My guesstimate is that there's a 1 in 3 chance there will be a penalty and a 1 in 10 chance the penalty will be public.

It's no secret that a lot of Google's reviews are manual[1] and popular websites like Expedia and RapGenius aren't reviewed by bots. This post and the one about RapGenius shows it's too easy for them to influence the algorithm. Like you said RapGenius got a manual penalty because they were openly flaunting their spam and giving Google a bad name in the process. Expedia does it more descretely and spends millions on Adwords so they won't have to worry.

[1]http://searchengineland.com/google-now-reports-practically-a...

If this is accurate it is a very poor seo and Expedia needs to hire better folks. Why place two links? Google will barely count a second link on the same page to the same URL...

I did notice that they give the blogger discretion on the link placement and anchor text so its somewhat natural...although still clearly link spam worth penalizing!

Every email I've gotten from Expedia has been from a different SEO company too.

How much were they willing to pay?

They have gone from $10 to $100 per sponsored post.

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