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Comment by ivank | Hacker News Reader

How exactly would deoptimizing Ryanair hurt them financially? Do Ryanair customers search Google for anything but "Ryanair" when they want to get to ryanair.com?

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Ryanair have such a well known airline brand that it's unlikely they are relying on organic search results.

A lot of non-tech people don't type any URL, they just type "Ryanair" in Google and click on the first link.

I do that (searching from the address bar) a lot, especially with non-US sites (like Ryanair) where you're not sure if it's .com or .co.uk or what.

True. But even with very few links, I suspect ryanair.com would come up high for a search for "ryanair". They get a bonus for an exact domain match. So no matter what they will probably come up high for searches for "Ryanair"

He's just using Ryanair as a general example. Maybe it wouldn't really hurt them, but it could have an effect on other companies with this dumb policy.

Oh yes. But any business relying on organic search and having an idiotic linking rules deserves to die.

well a google of "cheap flight dublin london" Ryanair comes up third. Which implies they must get a fair amount of traffic from search engines

3rd place gets you, what 10% of the people who search for it?

That is a fair point. I would guess it it 10% more of the clicks than 11th place though

Depends what the first 2 results are.

fwiw they are 2nd on duckduckgo for grandparents search, and the first airline.

That can be quite a number, depending on how many actually search for it.

Dear cavedave, this is an official notice to remind you that "You may not establish and/or operate links to this website without the prior written consent of Ryanair" as per the Terms & Conditions. In your blog post, you have linked ryanair.com in the sentence containing:

3. You go to their terms and conditions here and see they do not allow linking to their website

Please kindly unlink or be prepared for further legal action.

I will be sending you an email as well.

Thank you,

EAM Associates

Oh god that is head meltingly genius. Could you post that to the blog? Well played sir

If Google obeyed their T&Cs to the letter and didn’t list them at all that’d hurt them.

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