There’s an article in the travel section of today’s Times, bemoaning the fact that you can’t find hotel websites in Google. I was sufficiently moved by it to send them this email:

Having read your article on how difficult it is to find individual hotel websites via search engines, and being a professional web author myself, I had a look at the two you tested – the Zanzibar Hotel and the Amphone Hotel. And, in both cases, the main problem is not the search engines, it’s the website.

The site for the Zanzibar Hotel is particularly bad. It could not have been better at avoiding being listed on search engines if that was the intention – it breaks nearly every rule in the book about how to make a site search engine friendly and easily found on the web. It is actually listed on Google (your author probably gave up too soon, I found it eventually after playing around with various search terms), but it’s very unlikely to show up near the top of most lists due primarily to the extremely poor design. This is entirely the fault of the site’s designers, and demonstrates a serious lack of understanding as to how Google (or, indeed, the web) works.

The Amphone’s website is a bit better (I found it via Google after only a few minutes), but it still does a very poor job of making itself accessible to search engines. From a UK perspective, the site is hindered by having primarily non-English content, which pushes it down the rankings for google.com and google.co.uk (searching for it in Czech brought it to the top of the list a lot quicker). But the design of the site exacerbates rather than mitigates that problem, making it almost impossible for English-speaking web users to find it via a search engine. Again, this could easily be rectified by the site operators, if only they were aware of what they were doing wrong at present.

I don’t disagree with the basic premise of the article, that finding individual hotel websites via a search engine is often very difficult. But, on the evidence I’ve seen so far, this is mainly a problem for the hotels themselves rather than the search engines – complaining that Google doesn’t list these sites very highly is a bit like putting an illegible advert in Yellow Pages and then complaining to the phone company when no-one rings you.