Tyler Suchman

Tyler Suchman is the founder of Tribal Core, an internet strategy consulting firm, co-founder of 42 Terabytes, LLC, a social rewards firm, and owner of Dennison+Wolfe Internet Group, a WordPress development house.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Tyler’s success

Long tail sites

Result if you follow the steps in Tyler’s session

Greatly increase visibility for products or inventory

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

I wanted to break down for you and your audience, how a really big site gets organized, indexed and optimized. And so, I picked Airbnb because everybody knows them. I think everybody’s used them. And they have a massive amount of inventory and pages that we can take a look at.

So, let’s first take a look at the total number of index pages. If we do a Google search on site colon and then the URL, in this case, Airbnb, in the left hand column, we see that Google has indexed 23.8 million pages here in the green oval. It’s a lot of pages.

We can also see here with the blue arrows below that that there are multiple sub domains by country so fr.Airbnb.com is their French website. N, is for the Netherlands and P is for Portugal.

So, on the right hand side, let’s redo our search for just the www. And that still gives us 23.3 million pages. So, we’re going to start there as a base in terms of what Google has indexed from www.Airbnb.com.

So just for the international businesses out there that might be say in France and looking at those results is that saying that say Airbnb aren’t creating as many pages for their own local sites?

Well, there is a big distinction between what Airbnb has created or offered and what Google has indexed. So, depending on the distinction between any one listing on fr.Airbnb,com, it may be identical to the same listing on www since the w.ww has, you know, worldwide listings.

So, it may be that Google just sees that as duplicate content and only index is a small subset of the total number of pages they built out.

Okay, so when you’re saying that, does that mean we’re not going to be competing with Airbnb when it comes to say French language in this case?

Well, the site Airbnb, let me just say that. The site itself is pretty messy, and it feels like there’s a lot of stuff they’ve kind of built ad hoc over time, and there are probably a number of elements.

So, the site they can clean up and one thing I did notice, is that there are listings in other languages. And that includes both the listing itself and the reviews. So, you might see a listing in Chinese and the entire listing, and the reviews are all in Chinese.

I’m not exactly sure how that might translate to zh.airbnb.com. But suffice it to say, I think these are all things they have to deal with and struggle with. And this is pretty common when you get a page that builds into the millions of pages, a site that builds that big.