Large Cottages in Devon

October 3rd 2018

Wow, in all the excitement I nearly forgot what this blog is really all about! I have to talk about our house, our amazing self-catering holiday home with a fabulous indoor pool and many other wonderful facilities! No, really I do; otherwise I think we might end up going backwards in the ratings as we might appear less and less like a large country cottage holiday site.

I’ve just done a search for a large cottage in Devon with indoor pool sleeping 26. Sounds like us, right? Well, it apparently sounds like about 35 other websites more! Add in Ilfracombe or a full size snooker table and things do improve, we do arrive in the top 10. But there are still the same names above us. You have to actually put in something like large cottage in Ilfracombe sleeping 26 with indoor pool, hot tub and snooker table for us to get to the top of the list. Let me just check on Google Search Console to see how many times that was looked for…

Worse than that, if you actually look at those listings above us you’ll find it pretty hard to find a single property that does actually sleep 26 people, that does actually have an indoor pool, hot tub and/or snooker table and is in fact in Devon, let alone Ilfracombe. In fact there aren’t that many large cottages or houses in the whole of the UK that fit the bill. So why do they keep beating us?

Well, it seems to me for one reason because they are BIG sites with multiple properties and somewhere amongst them they do have swimming pools, snooker tables and hot tubs. And they do have houses in Ilfracombe and certainly many more in Devon. And they have big houses. They just don’t generally have all of these things in one place! Asking Google how many indexed pages these sites have gives some impressive results – the top site in my initial search comes back with 68200, and generally they all have thousands or tens of thousands. We have 32. Time to slink off into a corner perhaps?

Of course not! We must fight on! Of those 68200 pages I could only find 2 that actually offered the facilities that we have, and obviously neither were anywhere near as good as Bicclescombe Grange! So I must live in hope that ultimately it’s not just about size and, if I do everything else that I can, that we will appear where we should. It’s best to be optimistic…

In the meantime, just another 68150 posts to go then!