Outside of Panda, in terms of your goals for your business: do you really want to be in the business of arbitraging existing travel brands like Hale Koa Hotel and charging them (Hale Koa Hotel) money for customers who already knew of them? That strikes me as not a great place to be in life, for a lot of reasons. For one: what does Google need you for in that scenario? (Answer: nothing after they debut Google Travel and give it 80% of the non-ad real estate on the search page.) For another, you're in perpetual competition to be in the top ~10 of the 1,000 sites who are adding equally little value, and your best answer on why you should be there is guaranteed to be "OK so we're meh-tastic but come on we're 2% better than our meh-tastic competition doing the exact same thing we do."

Hi Patrick - Our goal isn't to charge money to customers who already know about existing brands, but to provide first-hand information ABOUT that brand that customers wouldn't otherwise learn from other sites (including the brand itself).

We've been focused on hotels in this specific example, but the same argument could be applied to any travel destination. If you're planning a trip somewhere, would you only want to get information from the official tourist bureau and the hotels themselves, or would it also be beneficial to see candid reviews, blogs, and photos, and interact directly with other travelers who have been to the same place? I would argue that the value provided by that information is worth a lot more than 2%.

The average traveler researches 2-5 sites before booking. and a large % of them are motivated by a desire to read reviews (http://www.phocuswright.com/library/fyi/427). Clearly there is some value provided there, and if we can provide relevant and unique information that leads to a sale, or profit off the sharing of such information through unobtrusive advertisements, then I don't see any problem with that.

And if we can provide more useful information than our competition (many of those sites listed above have almost no original information at all), then I also see no problem with ranking higher in the search results.

That's not to say we are 100% there yet for every destination, but I believe we do have a ton of valuable information, and our goal is to get to 100%.

I would be interested in knowing how your rankings change if you put some adsense into your pages. You said in your blog that you removed advertisements from your site- I assume that those were ads that didnt't go through Google. I wonder if Google rewards those who do advertise with adsense.

Let users rate the quality of reviews, like amazon does.

Also, get backlinks into your site for keywords like hotel reviews. To do this you can tell your reviewers to post on their blog twitter or Facebook that they just wrote a smashing review, and then place a link to their review.