Medellin Travel Guide-So whats in a URL name?

We are www.medellintravleguide.com We are Medellin Travel Guide.  We are the largest English web site dedicated only to Medellin Colombia.  We live in Medellin Colombia. We have over 150 pages of Medellin centric topics, accurate and current information about visiting Medellin Colombia.  We have over 150 Medellin photos. We have over 150 links to Medellin Hotels, Hostels, Bed and Breakfasts, Restaurants, Tour Agencies, Malls, Museums, Attractions.  We have 11 videos about Medellin Festivals, Nightclubs and Discos posted on YouTube.  Everything on our site is current, correct (to the best of our knowledge), updated monthly, ever evolving and yet, we do not have position 1 page 1 for a search for Medellin Travel Guide on any search engine in existence.

For example on Google,  page 1 position 1 belongs to World66.com.  Granted, they are a world wide travel site focused on cities all over the world and their contributors are actual travelers but, their last post was from August of 2006? They have 3 posts about Medellin Accommodations from the owners of the establishments; They have a brief mention of the Medellin Metro as a means of transportation without any mention of buses or taxis; They mention 2 museums in a city teeming with over 40 to visit; They mention 3 internet cafes in a city with the most internet connections in Colombia, hundreds of internet cafes and no mention of Wi-Fi Hot Spots; They only mention the Feria de las Flores in a city that has ferias almost every month; and, they have a whopping 30 photos posted of the city.

Third place goes to Virtual Tourist.  A travel site consolidator that gets travelers to post trip reports of their travel experiences. They boast 20 members living in Medellin, 99 photos and 71 Medellin Tips. Their last person living in Medellin that posted was Feb of 2007?

Position 4-This one is a real standout.  Title Page: Medellin Travel Guide | MyTravelGuide.com.  Another travel site consolidator for hotels (a grand whopping 1 hotel listed, 0 restaurants, 0 attractions, and 2 outdated deals listed by Travelzoo), well, it just goes downhill from there!

Somedays, I do not know whether to be honored or angry that they use our website/URL name in their title page.

Then there is Wikipedia in position 2.  We love this organization and all it has done to bring knowledge and information to the world at your fingertips.  We have even recently opened an account to help edit the information on Medellin on it’s site.  Not only is it outdated, much of it is downright wrong including the name of the person that discovered Medellin. For the sake of world knowledge, we will endeavor to commit an hour per week to getting it corrected.  We like Wiki and will help them all we can and are proud to have them use our name in their title page.

Then, there are the creative wannabes: TravelGuide-Medellin; Medellin-Travel-Guide; Colombia_Medellin_travelguide

We also like the sites that refer you to a city in Spain or the Phillipines named Medellin (don’t get on the wrong flight). Whatever they are, there are page after page of websites listed on Google, MSN, Yahoo. AltaVista and others that use Medellin Travel Guide as their 1st position Title Page description but……….There is only one www.medellintravelguide.com

Somedays we chuckle at what we find on other websites.  For instance, one site listed its favorite restaurant and even recommended it’s favorite item to order from the menu.  Save your taxi money. That particular restaurant was closed and bulldozed over a year ago to make way for a casino expansion.  Or the site that advertised special hotel rates for Feria de las Flores.  Unfortunately, the rates were from 2004 as were the dates for the festival. The best one was for a very upscale Medellin Hotel that really had us searching high and low for where this hotel was located. Suddenly a light went off about the address and we realized this hotel had been purchased and it’s name changed in 2005. Then there are the clubs and discos that have been closed for years or changed names, directions to local attractions that are incorrect, old maps that do not show new highways, links to sites that do not exist anymore or never existed in the first place and ad infinitum.

We spent hundreds of hours researching our data and facts.  We do monthly updates and announcements and on some pages, daily updates, we have people stopping us on the streets or approaching us in restaurants for information (The best was, “Hey, how many species of birds are there in Colombia?”  Our response, “1810, more than any country in the world”.

We must have done something right in choosing our name (and we made sure we had the .net  .info and .mobi URLs as well.  Now if we can just get the search engines to give us our credit due with page positioning we will be very happy.  We are working on it and hopefully someday soon, you will see our website where it belongs when you do a Medellin Travel Guide search. Just don’t put a lot of faith in the information you see on other websites unless it is current.  We’d hate to see you try to book a room at a hotel that no longer exists!

Medellin Travel Guide