Expedia Penalized by Google Around January 14 or 15, 2014

Looks like Expedia took a slight hit in their organic visibility around January 14/15, 2014 – likely after the recent outing (which I won’t link to).

Weekly organic visibility via SearchMetrics:

Last 30 days estimated organic traffic via SEMrush:

Pages that appear to be most penalized

• http://www.expedia.com/Flights
• http://www.expedia.com/Hotels
• http://www.expedia.com/Cars

Keywords that appear to be most penalized

As for specific keywords, it looks like they’ve dropped in rankings for a variety of keywords related to cheap, hotels, flights and cars. Here are some examples: cheap flights, airline tickets, hotels, rental cars, vacation. Here’s a quick look at the most recurring words from SearchMetrics’ top 100 losers last week:

Expedia’s loss is competitors’ gain:

Now that Google is breeding a culture of outing others and opened the door to negative SEO wide open, where will it stop?

• Kayak.com +7% visibility
• Orbitz.com +6% visibility
• Travelocity.com +4% visibility