Lay My Hat

We try as far as we can to track where people originally came from when they reach our site (either to list or to book). With that, we also asked people where they found us and it was very, very rarely that they came up with the correct answer in those situations where we knew how they'd reached us....

More important than .com/.co.uk is where your site is hosted. To give an idea of how significant that is, we originally hosted in the US ('cos it was cheap) but moved to the UK. Within 6 days, we had a 30 fold increase in the hits (our guests are mostly from the UK). This happens as google give high...

Zoot: I was very dismayed when I did my annual thinning out of the freebie site listings (www.ourinns.org/freesites.htm): 21 bit the dust in the last 18 months or so. Part of the problem is that a fair number of the freebie sites don't have an adequate funding mechanism in place to pay for hosting a...

lasourcetranquille: Paris probably doesn't appear as it is primarily a B&B/hotel type destination rather than holiday home type accommodation. I've separate B&B and rental home sites and there's quite a difference in search patterns between the two sometimes. Typically big cities pick up B&a...

Be very wary of dropping listings sites. Sometimes it's far from easy to track down just where your bookings come from. As an example, some years back someone here was going to drop visitfrance.co.uk as they seemed to be getting no bookings from them. Instead, they dropped the site link (saving £30 ...

I'm still around :D . Trying to sell MC though (couldn't stay on in France as they couldn't educate the kids in our area). The ourinns sites are definitely alive and well and indeed we're continuing to develop them. Hot off the presses update is at www.inns4u.com [B&B and self-catering with, unb...

In terms of blog promotion I've been experimenting with tweeting the posts on Twitter.com lately. Seems to pick up a fair bit of traffic for next to no effort though it varies a lot... so far it seems to have been most successful with some posts on www.ourinns.org/news although it was pretty good on...

He seems to be starting up again. We'd a bunch of emails stopped by the scam filtering on ourinns.org a week or two back but haven't had any from him for a year or so prior to that. On a related tack there's also a "tax refund" scam on the go at the moment aimed at the American market. Arn...

It depends on where your primary customer base is and where your hosting is. Due to the greater promotion of US based hosting services many people with UK customer bases are actually hosting in America and thereby losing a lot of customers. For example, in my own case, when I moved from US based hos...

I'm not sure that it's just French Connections that are having problems. If you try searching for something like "gites france", the first page is very different than it used to be. Yes, they're still there but then they're charging over £150/year vs moi with ourgites.org for free or max £...

Brooke, I was thinking about your .co.uk some more. I have way too many domains which means that now and again, I have a domain on a 301 when I've registed it before I'm ready to use it. As far as I know, the domain containing the 301 redirect has never received any PR which implied that it's ignore...

Don't forget that you'd need to promote the .co.uk domain too. If you've just let it sit there, then it won't do too well on the search rankings. I think I said before ages (like 2 years back!) that you shouldn't have the profile of guests that you actually have. It implies that you're losing a of p...

Good question on the 301. My understanding is that with a 301, google etc. consider that the original site doesn't exist in effect. One way to test that would be to take the 301 off for a few minutes, and look at the pagerank. If it's zero then google presumably aren't counting it. For your .co.uk, ...

I'd be waring of dropping listings at the moment Helen. Courtesy of the listings sites, I've heard from a number of people that there seems to have been an across the board reduction in booking enquiries over the last few months. I've certainly noticed that in terms of reduced traffic on the ourinns...

I don't know that many people would think of 0844 as being an "agent number". Most people I've spoken to seem to think that it's a mobile phone number and others have tried to call it as 0033844.... so you need to point out that it's a UK local rate number. I've also got a 1-800 American t...