Written by Guy Besley, Latitude Travel Services, Port Douglas,
Well we know you do it, why no, doesnt everyone? “No, actually” but anyway if as a property owner/ manager you are in the habit of putting up a few fake Trip Advisor reports you are doing your digital marketing an injustice and beware of the implications.
You may be able to get a bit of attention from the minority of people that use Trip Advisor, BUT, and there is a big BUT; Google love trip advisor in their serach criterea, so in short if you do a search of a hotel, accommodation, tour etc. and if you are a saavy surfer of the internet, chances are you will use the “More Tools” tab and narrow your search down to only recent content, thus eliminating the old stale websites. Yes guys, people do! Why wouldn’t you? After all who wants to see a website that hasn’t been touched for over a year, maybe their accommodation is as stale.
Image via CrunchBase
So what has this to do with Trip Advisor and a Google search? Simple, as the internet Savvy potential customer wants relevant information to their search string, they narrow down the time period to the last year, or even month. I bet most of you havnt even touched YOUR websites for at least a year, worse, you may have put up a few bogus Trip Advisor listings. So all the potential customer will see is those trip advisor listings, NOT your website. Why? Well like I said, Google love trip Advisor at the moment, so they rate highly. Now with a Google search narrowed down to the recent content only then obviously the most recent content will be the Trip Advisor Reviews.
Now is this a problem? Maybe, Maybe not. I say it is; because when the potential customer clicks on the link to the Trip Advisor listing they land on Trip Advisors site, NOT your site, and more than likely they will then continue thier searchin on Trip Advisor and hence end up with one of your competitors.
So how to avoid this problem, easy, firstly dont encourage Trip Advisor reviews and/ or keep your website updated, its that simple 
Hope that helps, if you have any questions about this please feel free to shoot me an email. guy@latituderesorts.com.au
