I discovered something cool (if you like SEO)

Yeah! And thank you very much.

Back from holiday now. Hoping to keep adding new ones every day :)

Took my time to read it, but that's fascinating.

Thanks a lot for sharing. Probably going to have to write about this one haha

So none of these pages are actually that "unique". But supporting @Mailman's anecdote that actually doesn't matter very much!

I wrote a similar case study about Nomad List, and the situation was again similar.

Programatically generate pages changing a few variables and that's all.

What does help Thomas Cook massively is they have a great domain authority (from all the press etc ...) A much smaller blog wouldn't get close to being able to rank for this search. They would have to start longer tail.

For example, instead of "things to do - tenerife", "things to do - tenerife - teenagers ... "

I asked a friend of a friend who was a developer and SEO, how he ranked so well and he told me one of his methods was basically the same kind of thing in this post. When I told him it seemed like it would be really costly to make thousands of pages with unique content, he said he personally generated them programmatically and none of them were done manually.

I didn't want to annoy him because I had already asked him so many questions but I remember wanting to ask how he prevents google from recognizing the pattern or even just it looking suspicious when uploading four thousand pages in one day. Google probably calculates the % of unique text and other factors that could identify when content filled pages are generated programmatically with little value but who knows. What I know for certain is that he had a few weird informational sites with nothing more than business listings on them like a yellow pages would and he showed me his adsense account earnings making more than 400k per year per site and he said he created all the pages in the same way.