This premium solution allows Review Collection partners to display Tripadvisor content as hotel-branded reviews (aka “white label” reviews), and also to garner SEO benefit from reviews collected in partnership. Reviews will be collected in the usual way via the Review Collection widget, displayed on Tripadvisor, and passed back to partner via API. An agreed proportion of these reviews will be flagged as “crawlable”, meaning that they can be indexed on partner’s site and visible to search engine crawlers. Additionally, the average rating and count of the indexed reviews may be aggregated to form Rich Snippets to display on search engine result pages.
Data will be passed to partner via JSON API (see )
Data comprises:
(at property level):
(at review level):
*Jointly collected reviews will be tagged as “partner_crawlable=true” or “partner_crawlable=false” in the proportion set by your contract. You may display all of these reviews, however you may only index on your site those tagged with “partner_crawlable=true”. The reviews tagged with “partner_crawlable=true” may also be displayed as hotel-branded (white label) reviews.
**The organic reviews are all non-crawlable and partner must follow guidelines to hide these reviews from search engine crawlers.
Here is an example of how a partner might display hotel-branded and Tripadvisor-branded content side-by-side. Note that it is required to display both the aggregate rating/count of crawlable Jointly Collected reviews AND the overall Tripadvisor Traveller Rating.
1. Aggregate rating and count of the crawlable reviews only. This is also what would be displayed in the Rich Snippet (see below). Partner may display this in whichever colour palette or design they wish (stars/squares/circles/smiles etc).
This data should ideally be cached and calculated on a daily basis (or weekly, if daily is not possible).
2. Overall TripAdvisor review count and rating of all reviews, all sources, all time. Partner may choose to display this via either:
Partner must observe Tripadvisor Brand Guidelines for displaying the overall rating and review count:
-Owl eyes with five green circles
-Text “Tripadvisor Traveller Rating” and “Based on xxx reviews”
3. The most recent Jointly Collected review marked as “partner_crawlable=true”, with partner branding
4. The most recent
When displaying an organic Tripadvisor review, or a non-crawlable Jointly Collected review, Tripadvisor branding (green bubbles) must always be used. Please also note section below “Indexing vs not-indexing content”.
| IMPORTANT: Partner must allow their Tripadvisor Account Manager to access the dev/pre-live environment BEFORE putting any content live. This is so we may check the display requirements and brand guidelines have been met. If a partner integration goes live without Tripadvisor’s prior knowledge, we reserve the right to suspend API access until any display issues have been rectified. |
Please see here for an overview of Google’s Rich Snippet guidelines and how to mark up the content: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/review#review-snippet-guidelines
The aggregate score for the Rich Snippet must be unique, therefore partner must not use the overall Tripadvisor Traveller rating and review count (as this is already used for the Tripadvisor listing on the search engine result pages).
Instead, partner must calculate the rich snippet score using the total review count and average score of the crawlable reviews only.
For example:
A hotel has 1500 reviews in total and an average Tripadvisor score of 4.0. This will appear as the Rich Snippet underneath the Tripadvisor.com listing in the search engine result.
The hotel has 450 jointly collected reviews, 75% of which are crawlable (as per contract).
The partner should follow the guidelines to mark up a review count of 337 (75% of 450), and the average rating of those 337 reviews (add up the total rating of those reviews and divide by 337). The search engine crawler will pick up this data and display it as the Rich Snippet along with a visual star rating.
This aggregate rating and review count must also be displayed to the consumer on the partner’s site (as per example above).
Partner must ensure to only index reviews on their site which are tagged with “partner_crawlable=true”. Here are two ways of doing this:
Here is some useful information from Google on robots.txt: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6062608?hl=en
Q. How do I know which reviews are crawlable?
A. Look for the tag at the bottom of each review in the API:
Q. Can I select which reviews I would like to index on my site?
A. No. The “crawlable” tag is assigned at random, in the proportion specified by your contract. You may only index the reviews tagged with “crawlable=true”.
Q. It looks like all of my most recent reviews are not crawlable – why?
A. The crawlable tag is assigned at random, and may not be completely chronological. This may mean that you have several reviews in a row that are not crawlable, followed by several reviews that are crawlable. The overall SEO share % will be as per your contract, and it is not influenced by rating or any other factor.
Q. What is the difference between “organic” and “Jointly Collected” reviews?
A. Organic reviews are those submitted to Tripadvisor by users who didn’t receive an email invitation from the hotel brand (or from the hotel brand’s guest survey provider).
Jointly Collected reviews are the opposite – i.e. reviews collected from guests who received a post stay email or survey invitation, and clicked through to write a review via the Review Collection widget.
Q. Do the Jointly Collected reviews count towards a hotel’s Tripadvisor ranking?
A. Yes! All reviews, whether indexed on partner site or on Tripadvisor, count towards the ranking.
Q. Why can’t I index all of the reviews?
A. This is because search engines favour unique content, so if reviews were to be indexed on both partner site and Tripadvisor at the same time, both parties would suffer search engine ranking penalties. Therefore it’s important to only index the reviews tagged as “partner_crawlable=true”, as these will not already be indexed on Tripadvisor.
(The exception to this is if your contract stipulates that you may index 100% of the Jointly Collected reviews, in which case they will all be tagged as crawlable). Organic reviews must never be indexed on the partner site.
Q. How does Tripadvisor manage non-indexing of reviews?
A. The reviews that are tagged as “partner_crawlable=true” in the partner API will be visible on Tripadvisor, but hidden from search engine crawlers by AJAX technology.