In many vacation rental listing websites you must have noticed that the same holiday home/ homestay is listed many times. Owners ideally like to see their property ad on the first page of the search result page, so when their ad is pushed to the second or third page, they feel that posting it again will give them a place on the first page, which is of course totally wrong!

Here are some reasons why you should not post multiple ads of the same holiday home in a vacation rental listing website:

First, by posting multiple ads in the same vacation rental listing website you will not be adding any value to your property, because the property images are the same and so is the description.

Second, by posting the same property many times, the traveler might assume that you are spamming. It gives a bad impression and travelers might think that something is wrong with the property and you are trying to gain attention by posting the same property again and again.

Third, because you will be using the same content, your listings will actually go down in the rankings because search engines will take the pages as duplicate content. Search engines term duplicate content as the situation where multiple URLs have the same or almost the same content. For instance, if you post your property more than once, you will have multiple urls, but the content will be the same (see the image below).

Holiday home multiple postings — The combination of two print shots of separate listings of the same property. Notice that everything here is duplicate, except the urls (marked by arrows). Search engines don’t take multiple postings too well and will consider only one ad for the rankings!

So when search engines identify cases of duplicate content they try to find out which is the best version of the page that should appear in the search results. Normally this choice is made based on the age of a particular property listing page. So in short, even if you post the same property many times on the same vacation rental listing website, it is actually the oldest property page that will rank higher.

So what should one do?

Never post your property more than once in the same vacation rental listing website.

If your property listing ad is not appearing on top or on the first few pages, try to analyze where you have gone wrong. Take a look at the ads appearing on the top of the search result page and see why these properties are on top – is the title (headline) of your property OK?, Do you have enough description to keep search engines interested on your page?, Do you have enough images of your property?, etc.

Update your listing from time to time. Click new images of your property, delete the old ones in your listing and upload the new images. Change the description of your property if any changes have been made to it. Try working on the description according to the changing season. Write about how a particular season adds more appeal to your property.