Which entries were removed from the Panglao list?

Bilar Man-Made Forest at 32.4km, Camugao Falls at 28.0km and Pangas Falls at 39.1km, all measured from the centre of Panglao island. Each is a genuine Bohol attraction and worth visiting. None of them is on Panglao, and all three require crossing to the mainland and driving inland.

Is Panglao actually separate from Bohol?

Panglao is its own island, joined to Bohol by two short bridges near Tagbilaran. It is roughly 24km by 8km and holds Alona Beach, the dive sites and most of the resorts. Bohol's waterfalls and the Chocolate Hills are all on the much larger mainland, an hour or more inland by road.

Why did a search for Panglao return mainland Bohol?

The Google Places query asked for things to do in Panglao Bohol and set the region to the Philippines, which biases results but does not restrict them geographically. Because the phrase includes Bohol, mainland attractions were reasonable matches, and nothing in the pipeline checked how far from Panglao a result actually was.

What stops it happening again?

Every section now has a centre point and a radius, and any venue outside the circle is rejected on the way in. Panglao is set to 13km, which covers the whole island including Hinagdanan Cave at Bingag in Dauis, and excludes Bilar at 32km. The same check runs on the monthly verification, so an entry that is already published gets removed too.

Is Hinagdanan Cave on Panglao?

Yes. It sits in Bingag, in the municipality of Dauis, which shares Panglao island with Panglao town. It measures 6.8km from the island centre and stays on the list. Dauis is often mistaken for the mainland because it is the first municipality after the bridges, but it is on the island.

Where can I see the ranking method?

The how we choose page sets out the scoring in full. Position comes from a Bayesian average of the Google rating and the number of ratings behind it, so a high score from very few reviews does not outrank a slightly lower score from thousands. Ranking is never sold.

Panglao

Three waterfalls that are not on Panglao

Half of this site's Panglao list was not on Panglao. Bilar Man-Made Forest, Camugao Falls and Pangas Falls are on mainland Bohol, between 28km and 39km from the island and over an hour away by road. All three have been removed, and the section now covers a 13km radius around the island itself.

By Tony Hilden 28 July 2026 3 min read

Contents

Panglao is an island
How it happened
The same audit found worse
What changed
What the Panglao list is now

Until this week, three of the six things this site recommended doing on Panglao were not on Panglao.

Bilar Man-Made Forest sits 32.4km away. Camugao Falls is 28.0km away. Pangas Falls is 39.1km away. All three are real, all three are worth seeing, and all three are on mainland Bohol, which means crossing the bridges out of Panglao and driving inland for over an hour. If you had booked a Panglao trip off this list expecting to reach them on a scooter after breakfast, the list was the problem.

Panglao is an island

This is the detail the site got wrong, and it is an easy one to lose if you have never been. Panglao is its own island, about 24km by 8km, joined to Bohol by two short bridges near Tagbilaran. Alona Beach is on Panglao. The dive sites are off Panglao. Almost every resort is on Panglao.

Bohol’s waterfalls are not. Neither are the Chocolate Hills, the tarsier sanctuary or the Loboc river. Those are all on the mainland, and the drive is the reason people book them as a full-day tour rather than an afternoon.

Filing a mainland waterfall under Panglao is not a rounding error. It is the difference between a ten minute ride and a day trip.

How it happened

The list is built from the Google Places API. The query for this section asked for things to do in Panglao Bohol, and set the region to the Philippines.

Two problems in one line. Setting the region biases which results Google favours and how it formats addresses, but it does not restrict anything, so it was never going to keep results on the island. And the query itself said Bohol, which made mainland attractions perfectly reasonable matches. Google was not wrong. It answered the question it was asked.

Nothing downstream measured how far from Panglao a result actually was, so nothing rejected them.

The same audit found worse

Checking one section is never enough, so the audit ran across all eight publications in this network, comparing every listed venue against the address Google holds for it.

The worst result was not here. On the sister site for poke and salad bowls, a restaurant at 1214 University Ave in Flint, Michigan was ranked the single best bowl place in Makati. It had been sitting at position one with a correctly calculated editorial score, 13,136km from the city it was supposedly the best in.

Eleven venues across the network were in the wrong place. One country, four cities, three islands.

What changed

Every section now has a centre point and a radius, and a venue outside that circle is rejected before it can be published. Panglao is set to 13km from the island centre. That keeps Hinagdanan Cave, which is in Bingag in the municipality of Dauis at 6.8km and genuinely on the island, and it excludes Bilar at 32km.

The check also runs on the monthly verification pass, which matters more than it sounds. Verification used to ask one question of each venue: are you still trading. A waterfall on the mainland is still trading. So is a poke bar in Michigan. Asking only about closures would have preserved every one of these errors indefinitely, month after month, while reporting that nothing was wrong.

What the Panglao list is now

Six entries, all of them on Panglao island: Hinagdanan Cave, Napaling Reef, Kalipayan Beach, Moadto Strip, South Farm and Bohol Show Ocean Fantasy.

The mainland waterfalls are not coming back to this page. They belong on a Bohol page, which is a different guide to a different place, and the distinction is the whole point of a list that says Panglao at the top.