ISEdb.COM

It was a few weeks before our
annual trip to Pompano, FL to visit my grandmother and get away from the nasty New England weather. We had
our plane tickets and hotel reserved, but still needed a rental car. I’d been reserving cars for years
through a rental car aggregator website that I found many years ago when searching online for rental cars in
Ft. Lauderdale. It was one of those websites that show you the best prices from the various companies in the
area. Years ago it always showed up in a search for “rental cars Ft. Lauderdale” or similar
searches, so I never bothered to remember their name.

This year, however, I typed the keyword phrase
“rental car ft. lauderdale airport” at Google and didn’t see the site I was looking for on the
first or second page of results. Too lazy to sift through my old emails to find the company name, I noticed
the number-one result was an Expedia page for rental cars in Ft. Lauderdale. “Okay,” I thought,
“Expedia does a good job with finding decent flights, so this should work fine for rental cars as
well,” and clicked through.

What I was met with was paragraphs and paragraphs of prose on why
renting a car in Ft. Lauderdale was a good idea. In other words, pretty much a doorway page created by some
sort of SEO-type.

And thus began my Twitter rants:

Everyone knows that I am a fan of making sure that people know they’re
at the right place on your website when they get there by having some descriptive copy, but this was just
silly. It’s not that the copy was overly keyword stuffed, it just wasn’t necessary. If I’m
searching for a rental car in Ft. Lauderdale, I’m already sold on the fact that I need a rental car. And
I know I need it in Ft. Lauderdale. And yes, I also know that Ft. Lauderdale is a really cool place to visit
(that’s why I’m going there!).

At any rate, I decide to overlook the zealous SEO efforts
(after all, they were #1 for the search query, so they must have been givin’ ole Googly what she wanted),
and I looked for the form to choose my car. There was nothing in the first screenful that allowed this. But
there was a box in the sidebar with links to all the other locations from which I could order a rental car!
Of course, this wasn’t very helpful since I had already said at Google that I wanted one from Ft.
Lauderdale – especially since I was on the Ft. Lauderdale landing page.

So I scrolled all the
way down past the SEO text to look for the form. Ahh…there it was, way down at the bottom of the page.


Thus, my second ranting tweet:


Okay, so now I had found the form, but guess what? It wasn’t pre-filled
in with Ft. Lauderdale as the pickup location!

This led to my third Twitter
rant…


…and the straw that broke the camel’s back. I ranted once more to
any Twitter followers who were still listening, and left Expedia in a huff:


I then went back to my original Google results, gave a quick scan and saw
Thrifty there. I knew we had gotten good prices from them before, so I gave them a shot. So far, so good
– their form was pre-filled out with Ft. Lauderdale Airport as my pickup location as it should have been
– yay! Unfortunately, they were all sold out for the days of our trip. I scanned the search results
again and saw Alamo, which we had also used in the past. Their resulting page was their home page, which I
thought was weird. That also meant that their form was not pre-filled out with the location. I filled it in
anyway, but their prices looked awfully high to me and I was pretty sure I could do better if I could just
find an easy place to compare prices, like I was originally looking for.

I clicked through multiple
pages of Google search results looking for the familiar website that I used to use, but couldn’t seem to
find it and still didn’t remember the name (and was still was too lazy to look through old emails). I
decided to change my search query a little bit and see if I could find it that way. Bingo! I finally found
it, although it was pretty buried. When I clicked through, it was the perfect page. Not only did it have a
pre-filled-out form and not a lot of useless keyword-stuffed prose, it even had a sample pricing chart for
the most popular car rental agencies. Within 2 minutes of finding that page, I had my car reserved at a great
price from Payless.

Figuring that I might be in the same boat next year, I wanted to ensure that I
could easily find the website again, and remembered Google’s newish SearchWiki
function that lets you move websites up and down in the search results. While you only move them up in your
own personal results (and must be logged in to your Google account to enable this), it occurred to me that
this was exactly what SearchWiki was designed for.

I had previously thought about playing with
SearchWiki a bit to see what it was all about for SEO purposes. The thing is, I don’t particularly trust
Google and was afraid that hundreds or even thousands of SEOs were probably already out there trying to scam
the SearchWiki results by moving their clients’ websites to the top of the list. I had no interest in
flagging our sites as having been SEO’d. Why provide Google with that sort of signal?

And yet, I
had been curious about SearchWiki and how “regular people” might use it. Here was the perfect
opportunity to try SearchWiki and use it to personalize my own results. And so I did. I moved my favorite
rental car aggregator page to the top of the search results page (SERP), and also wrote a nice comment on why
I had done so, being sure to mention that I wasn’t affiliated with the company, just a happy long-time
customer.

Checking the Google SERP with personalization completely off, as well as with SearchWiki off
(by using a Chrome Browser Incognito window)
shows Expedia is still #1 and my favorite website is still nowhere to be found. In fact, they seemed even
harder to find, which worries me a little. I certainly hope that my moving them up didn’t actually hurt
them  but that’s probably just my tinfoil hat talking!

When searching while logged in with
my personalization on, my favorite website does show up first, complete with a little green SearchWiki arrow
next to it showing that I moved it there. My comment also shows up as part of its description. As long as
Google doesn’t scrap SearchWiki by the time I’m looking to reserve a car next year, I should be able
to easily find my favorite site right at the top of the results.

How about you? Have you tried
SearchWiki in this way? I just read that they’ve added even more personalized functionality this week
called Google Preferred Sites. Feel
free to let me know how you’re using SearchWiki or the new Preferred Sites in the
comments!