DID YOUR TRIPADVISOR RANKING CHANGE?
May 16, 2016Travel Website’s Popularity Ranking Algorithm Updated
If you run a hotel or resort, chances are you are familiar with TripAdvisor. It’s the world’s leading travel review website, and it has grown exponentially over the last decade.
In fact, TripAdvisor has grown so much that they needed to write new code for their website’s Popularity Ranking Algorithm, because while they were able to accommodate the six million reviews they had in 2006, in 2016 they now have to manage more than 350 million.
The sheer volume of incoming reviews is to the point now where there are 200 contributions to the TripAdvisor website every minute. This growth has caused occasional anomalies in the popularity ranking, where newly-listed properties could become ‘fast-risers’ and move quickly up the charts based on a small number of reviews. Over time more incoming ratings would stabilize these fast-risers, causing them to drop significantly in the rankings.
TripAdvisor has now ‘enhanced’ their Popularity Ranking algorithm to improve their website, but more importantly to make a more accurate representation of how a property ranks over time.
Obviously it is a complicated computational process that TripAdvisor’s Popularity Ranking algorithm utilizes to dictate these new rankings, but it can actually be summed up quite easily – if you want to rank higher on TripAdvisor, focus on these three points:
- More reviews are better than fewer reviews.
- Good reviews are better than poor reviews.
- Recent reviews are better than older reviews.
We have already begun to see the effects of these changes: some properties have ranked up while others have ranked down. These algorithm changes have been a process, not instantaneous, so we may yet see more changes over the rest of the year.
Rankings are also calculated daily as reviews come in, so there really is nothing better than current, up-to-date reviews from recent happy customers!
Read More About the New TripAdvisor Popularity Ranking Algorithm.