TripAdvisor.com does a pretty good job of providing user reviews of hotels and stuff; although recently the flaw in their model has been discussed...namely that they don't presently connect reviews to actual transactions which opens them up for a certain amount of gaming, ie. I can log in and review a hotel I've never stayed at, or that Hotels offer incentives for positive reviews. Of course TA argue that the sheer volume of reviews on the site makes those attempts at gaming pretty much a non issue, and I wouldn't be surprised if they've got plans to integrate the booking (they're owned by Expedia now) and reviewing side of things more which would address this issue to a some extent.
Regardless of all that, what amazes me more is their use of authority in organic search results to rank for pages like this one for New York Hotel Deals (no.1 result for that query in Google at the time of writing, and on the data center serving my results). Have a close look at that page. There is no real content there, the main column is 100% paid links, mostly powered by Adsense, while the left hand column contains links to 100 or more pages just like this one for other cities, and the right hand column seems to be filled mostly with affiliate links (ads masquerading as content).
Now I don't have a problem with TA presenting advertising on their site, they gotta make money. But wow...the number one result in google (for a very competitive search term) and you'd be pretty hard pressed not to click on an ad here...talk about made for Adsense (MFA). The Adsense CTR on this page must be phenomenal.
The question is should a page which is pretty much designed for the purpose of serving ads be the #1 result for such a competitive search term?
Tell us what you think...