On March 31st, I included a blurb about Hotelicopter in the Voyalinks of the day. It turns out that it was a fake. Hotelicopter.com now shows hotel booking website.
Using an April fool as a way to launch their site was actually a very smart move from Hotelicopter. What was presented as the “first flying hotel” was heavily tweeted, blogged and shared through social networks.
Yahoo! Site Explorer now shows that the new site has already over 1,600 inbound links. Anyone with a basic knowledge of SEO can understand that these links will boost Hotelicopter ranking in the search engines.
New sites often take a long time to receive decent traffic and need link-building campaigns from specialised SEO agencies. Hotelicopter has found a way to speed up the process with their April fool. Not only did they get a massive number of links, but they also got them from sites with authority like Boing Boing, CNET, Gizmodo, Techcrunch (in SEO, all links are not equal, the authority of the sites linking to you plays a huge part) which usually could not have cared less about the launch of yet another hotel booking site.