squidoo

I'm now fiddling with what's possible on squidoo: http://www.squidoo.com/hotelbuddy/

It's kind of like what I want to do - build websites using other content but with your own special flavour. It's great that they've already added in the monetising part of the equation so you don;t have to pretend that the site is some personal experiment. Just get on and make some money.

Or you can, like I have done, elect to have the money donated to charity. Great idea. Not sure they'll make too much off mine though.

100 Top Hotel sites

One of the blogs I read regularly is THE BOOT by Tim Hughes.

Recently Tim posted an article on a site that claims to rank the top 100 hotel sites.
If you love a list of hotel sites, you'll like (and hate) TOP 100 HOTEL SITES

Using one of my SEO test sites I set up a link as the TOp 100 requested and lo-and-behold I'm at number 309:
http://www.top100hotel.com/www.bellhop.co.nz.html

So a site about New Zealand Hotels is the 309th most popular hotel site on the planet.

It's even more popular than rooms-manager.com (Number 312) which describes itself as:

"ROOMS-MANAGER.COM, part of Priceline.com (Nasdaq:PCLN) is Europe’s leading online hotel reservations agency by room nights sold, attracting over 15 million unique visitors each month via the Internet from both leisure and business markets worldwide.

Established in 1996, ROOMS-MANAGER.COM offers competitive rates for any type of property, ranging from small independent hotels through to a five star luxury. The site is available in 15 languages and offers over 30,000 hotels in more than 8,000 destinations."

Update 4 Sept 2007: I'm now number 205, rising fast.

Rating: 3550 points* (was 3650 so someone has removed me ...)

*amount mentions of word 'www.bellhop.co.nz' on the other websites

Yahoo site explorer

I've heard that the Google links: report is unreliable so I've been playing with Yahoo site explorer to see who is linking to me:

siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com: www.hotelbuddy.us

siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com : www.hotelbuddy.co.uk

siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com: www.bellhop.com.au

siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com: www.bellhop.co.nz

I think the results are more useful than Google's equivalent in the webmaster tools beacuse this lets you drill down into the results and also see when a page was last crawled.