(Entry was posted by Jacob Elbaum on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 02/20/2020).

Is this some kind of SEO-related trick?

Hi all,
I`m stumped right now!
I`m trying to figure out how AirBnb ranks their category pages.
I performed a google search for "chicago airbnb" just to see the structure of one of their pages and the SEO implications.
I enter the page, and perform a CTRL+F for the word "Chicago" to see how many times that keyword was mentioned.
163 times!!!
But when I actually review the page, I only see it in 18 places.Is this some kind of SEO-related trick? Where are the other 140+ mentions of the word "Chicago"?Thanks ahead of time!

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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

Rob Watts: There are multiple urls returned for that phrase dependent upon where you are on the planet. They use hreflang extensively to return different pages to different users. I don`t know what url you are referencing but the one I had a brief glance at here https://www.airbnb.co.uk/s/Chicago has 2 mentions on the page and around 162 within the code. These are mainly meta data and url string references. No "tricks" from what I saw.
Travis Bailey: I dislike a lot of people. But I like you.
Francois-Pierre Marcil: 1) No
2) hreflangs for international localization
3) they cant rank top 5 for the keywords they want "vacation rentals in Chicago" - this is quite poor for a site with that kind of equity.
George G.: Airbnb is a bad example. You want to get the small players from the serp and investigate them.
Jacob Elbaum: Curious. Why investigate the small players? Because they`re able to achieve high ranking with much less equity?
George G.: yes. exactly. Airbnb is a huge authority with zillion links. You want to get your onsite close to w/e the small players that rank are doing and then build more links than them in time. This is how you can eventually beat them.
Alex Harford: To find the other mentions, click one of the `Details` links beneath the photos in `Places to Stay` and `Popular Homes`. You`ll see loads of `Chicago` mentions in reviews. You can also see in the source code (Ctrl+U) and Web Developer Tools (F12 in Chrome).