Travel link building

UK holiday booking has a well-known spike. ABTA calls the first Saturday after the Christmas and New Year break "Sunshine Saturday" and says it is usually the busiest day of the year for booking foreign holidays. A link to your Greek islands page ordered in January will be live for the summer, but it missed the window where a lot of people chose where to go.

Every travel business has its own version. Ski operators book through autumn. City break sellers spike around events and school holidays. Hotels in Edinburgh live and die by August. Plan the campaign backwards from those dates and allow for writing, review, publication and crawling.

The second issue is supply quality. Travel blogging has a long tail of sites that once had real readers and now mostly sell links, with traffic that halved after a core update and a sidebar of casino banners. DR alone won't show you that.

Then relevance. A walking holiday operator gets more from a hiking blog that covers the Picos de Europa than from a general travel site that covers everything badly, and much more than from a lifestyle site with a "travel" tag.

Destination pages, tour or itinerary pages, and seasonal hubs with stable URLs ("/ski-holidays/" rather than "/ski-deals-2027/"). The offers on them change, the URL doesn't, and each year's links add up. Hotels should point links at the property page and location guides more than individual room pages.

Anchors that read naturally in travel copy are usually descriptive: "guided walking holidays in northern Spain", "family ski chalets in Morzine". Mix those with your brand and plain URLs, and avoid repeating short head terms like "cheap holidays", which look bought and probably won't rank for you anyway against the big online travel agents. More on mixing anchors in our anchor text guide.

One travel-specific risk: bloggers refresh their best posts every year. "Best Greek islands for families" gets rewritten each January, and sometimes the rewrite quietly drops your link or swaps it for whoever paid most recently. Who checks that in March? The Live Link Tracker does, re-checking each live link for the anchor, the target redirect and the link attribute, and flagging changes in your Inbox.