NB: This is a viewpoint by Dennis Goedegebuure, head of global search engine optimization (SEO) at Airbnb, the private-home-rental listings website. It is based on an earlier post from his blog.
Here at Airbnb, I'm fascinated by search, especially by quirks and changes in Google SERPs (search engine results pages), and the difference between the paid and organic sitelinks. I think a recent discovery I've made is relevant to many other travel companies that rely on search for customer acquisition.
When searching for our brand term in San Francisco (where I work), I get a number of local pages on Airbnb as sitelinks. In the screenshot (below), you see a link to the city page and a link to listings in downtown San Francisco.
Yet none of the other travel sites I tried were showing a similar localized footprint... Hmm...
If you change the location to New York, the sitelinks change to pages on Airbnb with rentals in New York, and specifically in Manhattan.
Taking this same location based search to a smaller city in the US -- Tampa, Florida -- you see again local sitelinks, but the anchor text is focused on the room type like; house, and apartment.
An inconsistent phenomenon
I tried to see if the local sitelinks are common in the travel vertical. They aren't. I wasn't able to replicate city-level sitelinks based on the searcher location with any of the other travel sites I tried.
The only website I was able to replicate this for, was for Yelp. (See screenshot.)
It also appears to be a phenomenon limited to the US. When the same search for "Yelp" was done in Google at a UK account, it returned generic results for Yelp's most popular local search areas: New York City, Portland. (See screenshot.)
Ditto for Airbnb as a brand search term when a user is based in the UK and using Google.co.uk.
Note to US users: on Google.com, you can only set your location to places within the US Zip Code system unless you use a virtual private network.
Are localized site links good for users?
A standard answer for any change made by Google is: It's good for users.
Yet it's questionable how useful these localized sitelinks really are for users. As I live in San Francisco, it's actually not really good for my experience to showcase San Francisco Airbnb pages, unless you would like to become a host on Airbnb.
My hypothesis is: Google is trying to become a mobile first company, where location of the user is becoming predominantly important.
Only if this is true, the localized San Francisco sitelinks make sense, as I might be looking for a place to stay in the city where I do a search on my smartphone!
NB: This is a viewpoint by Dennis Goedegebuure, head of global search engine optimization (SEO) at Airbnb, the private-home-rental listings website. It first appeared in a different form on his blog, The Next Corner.