Mallberry Suites Business Hotel Cagayan de Oro City

Well known hotel

The story of the website Mallberry Suites Business Hotel is actually one of the saddest stories I know related to SEO and internet.

It began a few years ago with us finding a lot of traffic to this hotel in Cagayan de Oro City to one of our sites, so this caught our attention as we did not fully understand why we would get so much traffic for one hotel.

The answer was very easy: Mallberry Suites had no own website and we as a web developer, then more web designer, saw an opportunity for a new customer.

While searching for the hotel we searched with a misspelled name: malberry suites. So one 'l' instead of two as in the official name. And not fully aware what was going on and with a lot of enthusiasm we thought we would do the hotel a favour, as at the time domain names were still very important.

So we bought the domain malberrysuites.com with the intention to just redirect the traffic to the 'real' website when the hotel would have their website. How wrong we were.

Initially our sales didn't want to go to the hotel as we didn't have any connections there and being in The Philippines connections are still important in business. So for a long time we didn't do anything, except that domain with a little placeholder website.

Then of course we tried a little bit to related the site/domain to the real hotel and did a little bit of SEO.

Anyhow, to make a long story short, over the years we slowly just 'own' the internet traffic for Mallberry Suites in Cagayan de Oro City.

More text later, but this would do for now.

More information

And some more information now, November 10, 2013 as the last few weeks, maybe months now, we saw a big change in statistics, in search.

We noticed for example that our Mallberry Suites site doesn't have the click-through rate it had before. And the reason is probably that Mallberry Suites had put up a Facebook page. And people seem to like it.

And nothing wrong with Facebook (or Google) or other internet giants. But somehow it is scary to me how powerful these organisations, businesses have become. And maybe it has always been like that in the capitalistic world, but I'm quite sure many people don't realize that Facebook and Google are businesses. And as they are growing, are on the stock market, often get more greedy.

And I'm in kind of a dilemma, as people use Google, including me, and use Facebook, including me, but not so much. And companies like Mallberry Suites see Facebook often as a cheap alternative for a website. And it seems to be, it is, and it seems to work.

But still, Facebook is a business, a company and the domain facebook.com is owned by a company, a private company. And I don't know there exact terms and conditions and there are practical issues to consider, but in the end facebook.com is owned and exploited by the company Facebook, Inc. (wow, and I can't find the official name with a quick search in Google). And would I want the marketing of my company to be owned by another company? The answer is not a straight yes or no, but I think something to consider when you want to rely on Facebook completely for your internet marketing.

Related

A related story is about Limketkai Luxe Hotel. But more about that later.