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GoCompare suffers big Google penalty?

According to this blog GoCompare.com has suffered a big penalty in Google. The site is still being indexed but doesn’t rank for it’s own name or title tag anymore although it does rank highly for it’s url which is a characteristic I’ve seen in a lot of penalised domains.

As we reported a few weeks back GoCompare used to rank number 1 for the term car insurance, an industry that has a lot of competition and where sites have traditionally bought a lot of links.

I can’t find any evidence of GoCompare.com selling links so in my opinion they must have been hit with a penalty (assuming this is a penalty rather than a glitch) for link buying rather than selling. Of course Google has fluctuations every day so this might resolve itself in due course.

Buying links is against Google’s guidelines but it is a practice carried out by a lot of major websites in the UK.

If Google is willing to hit a brand this big (they have TV adverts in the UK continually) then there are going to be some massive changes coming up.

BY Patrick Altoft AT 4:27am ON Thursday, 31 January 2008

Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3 and has worked in the SEO industry for over 10 years. With experience across some of the worlds largest brands as well as startup businesses Patrick is well known in the industry and speaks regularly at the major SEO conferences and events. Follow Patrick on Twitter or Google+

Comments

  • http://www.distilled.co.uk/blog Tom

    Wow – you’re right Patrick, I wonder if this signals something larger?

    Gocompare are pretty big over here so they must have something fairly concrete on them to get them banned…

  • http://www.gerarddoyle.com GerBot

    geez Patrick, have you recently lost a site from the credit card, insurance and mortgage verticals?

    you seem to be spending a lot of time looking at baned sites and sites that rank well. but only to keep reporting what you don’t like

  • http://oh.gd/ Charles

    Heh, I noticed this too today. Yesterday they were #1 for “car insurance” on Google UK. Today they are #65.

    I can’t see anything awfully terrible that they’ve done though. Unless they had a whole bunch of PR8 links that suddenly got discounted, or their rental ran out.

    Can you figure out what they did?

    - Charles

  • http://www.insiders-view.co.uk Insurance Blog

    Patrick,
    I’ve seen no evidence of them selling links but they’ve got a ton of paid postings on blogs. We reported this on our GoCompare Google post at the Insurance Blog on the 2nd Jan.

    The evidence is clear, try a few of these queries:
    http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rls=en&hs=D0m&q=gocompare+%22this+is+a+sponsored+post%22&btnG=Search
    http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rls=en&q=gocompare+reviewme&btnG=Search

  • julien

    wow dude. keep us updated on this, please.

  • http://www.blogstorm.co.uk Patrick Altoft

    Not at all, I just write what I see.

    Also the credit cards post was a guest post….

  • Mark

    Cool, all those links I purchased did the job and got them penalised :D

  • julien

    i can’t tell if you’re joking.

  • http://www.conversion-matters.co.uk Adam

    I wouldn’t say GoCompare are that big a brand? Not compared to something like Direct Line.

  • http://www.blogstorm.co.uk Patrick Altoft

    They were on track to give 8 million car insurance quotes in 2008. Given the TV advertising campaign I assume they must have some big backers.

  • Luke Daly

    Yeah, they are a massive company, the amount of money they will be making by sending through 8million quotes is massive.

    They also have their TV ads at premium times which isn’t cheap.

    I think its wrong that Google punish one company and not the rest.

  • http://www.insiders-view.co.uk Insurance Blog

    Patrick, GoCompare is backed by esure (part of the HBOS group).

    GoCompare were given a £30million marketing loan.

    Hayley Parsons, the founder discusses it on Insiders View. in the comments.

  • Mark

    >Joking, cant tell

    And therein lies the problem.

    What’s to stop a competitor buying links for a competitor and ratting them out?

    SEO’s, own worst enemies.

  • Gareth Southridge

    I see confused.com are now top for car insurance just how long will that last? having looked into their links they appear to be using some particularly dodgy directories such as seosources.com not to mention adding their link to just about every country they can think of in the yahoo directory coupled with some generally poor quality links and the use of unethical procedures just how long is before they too feel the wrath of Google and is anybody safe? I think a lot of the big players need to be more careful….

  • http://www.viperchill.com/blog/ Glen Allsopp

    THat’s going to lose them a lot of money, but it is deserved as they are clearly buying links.

  • An insurance seo guy

    GoCompare were very blatent in paying for links, just do a google search for “gocompare payperpost”. And the Watching America links are well documented.

    Re: Confused.com – what examples do you have of unethical links? Directory listings aren’t even greyhat – you may be referring to the fact lots of directories got penalised last year due to buying links for PR so they can charge more for listings – the same factor GoCompare seem to have been penalised for.

  • Mallory

    To ‘SEO Guy’ – wouldn’t you call submitting to thousands of irrelevant seo-friendly directories unethical? Gareth is right, confused.com use directories which any self-respecting SEO wouldn’t touch with a bargepole – it’s obvious they’re concerned more about quantity rather than quality and sooner or later they’ll get penalised. It’s happened to GoCompare, so nobody’s infallible!

  • An insurance seo guy

    Confused.com may or may not get penalised in the future – but not for using dodgy SEO directories. Websites get penalised for buying text links and spamming.

    A website using dodgy directories may get a knock in their rankings when the dodgy directories are penalised, but that’ll be as a result of the links not carrying so much weight – not a direct Google 50 place penalty as happened with GoCompare.

    Submitting to thousands of irrelevant seo-friendly directories you may call unethical – I call it a waste of time. Self respecting SEO’s can get much better results with less work by looking for relevance.

  • Gareth Southridge

    Oh dear I didn’t mean to start a debate ;) Do i sense a little hurt professional pride there “seo guy” maybe your defence of confused stems from perhaps working for spannerworks? although I hear they are now to be called “iCrossing”. To be fair though I do agree that they would most probably just take a drop in rankings if the big G were to look a little more closely at their directory listings. Having said that – can many websites in the top ten for keywords like “car insurance” stand up to that level of scrutiny? Look at sites like moneyexpert – they’ve climbed to the top of certain searches by utilising black hat techniques to accrue millions of links in a very short space of time and nothing seems to have happened to them with regards to any penalisation or drop in rankings. Maybe Google isn’t as omnipotent as we thought? or have we yet to see further action?

  • http://www.liamvictor.com/ Liam Delahunty

    It looks as though GoCompare’s SEO was done by Double Click’s search division.

  • http://weblogs.hitwise.com/robin-goad/ Robin Goad

    Hi – I’ve done some analysis using Hitwise data on the impact this has had on GoCompare’s search traffic, and it was pretty significant.

    Here is is my blog post: http://weblogs.hitwise.com/robin-goad/

    Robin Goad, Research Director, Hitwise

  • Richard Hearne

    My guess is that there is likely more behind this. Just a hunch, but who’s to say they didn’t do something far darker that is as yet unknown?

    If this was purely down to payperpost then this would mark something of a watershed.

    Rgds
    Richard

  • Melissa Smith

    How do you know if its just competitors buying links to your sites? That makes no sense if google ban you for that and how do they know if you are buying links anyway?

  • http://www.gerarddoyle.com GerBot

    Google didn’t Ban them Melissa.
    They just removed the voting power of pages providing the links.
    This is pretty much the only way Google can tackle these situations. As you point out if Google ban the target site it opens sites up to Google bowling from competitors.

  • http://www.blogstorm.co.uk Patrick Altoft

    Actually Google has given Gocompare a penalty which is much harsher than simply removing the voting power of the sites that link to it.

  • http://www.blogstorm.co.uk Patrick Altoft

    If you go through the links you will see that there is no way they could be totally natural. How many blogs can naturally write a review of a car insurance site and link to it using the text “car insurance”?

    Also if it was a competitor they are taking quite a gamble getting somebody to number 1 for a couple of months in the hope they get banned in the long term.

  • JimBeam

    Patrick, how do you ‘know’ that Gocompare have had a penalty rather than just losing the blog PR’s?

    Are gocompare the only sites using blogs to climb the rankings, surely they can’t be the only ones tohave done this.

  • http://www.blogstorm.co.uk Patrick Altoft

    You can tell it’s a penalty because they don’t rank for their own name.

  • JimBeam

    Fair enough.

    I don’t understand why google penalise gocompare on their brand names. I can understand a penalty against random searches, but surely if a google user is searching specifically for gocompare and they don’t come up top, then google is not keeping up their end of the google/customer proposition of giving the user the results they want to see.

    Are you aware of any other sites using blogs for seo?

  • http://imafish.co.uk/ Pete White

    I did a sponsored review on gocompare a couple of months ago and was recently asked (with another payment) to add nofollow tags.

  • http://www.onlineadvertisinggroup.com David

    I am seeing http://Gocompare.com back on 8th rank for keyword car insurance one… was this index-page drop instead of penalty, as remember Matt Cutt, commented once that if there is penalty site drops ranks slowly instead of sudden removal… I have recently seen same type of drops for http://carinsurance1.co.uk http://Quotezone.com. I have also seen google is giving less importance to number of pages on the website couple of month bank number of pages on your site use to have big positive… this google makes me confuse man

  • http://www.blogstorm.co.uk Patrick Altoft

    It was a penalty but GoCompare acted the right way and fixed the issue so Google removed the penalty.

  • http://weblogs.hitwise.com/robin-goad/ Robin Goad

    Hi there – we’ve just punlshed an update to this story using Hitwise data – it seems like the recovery process is long and slow…

    http://weblogs.hitwise.com/robin-goad/2008/04/how_long_does_it_take_to_recover_from_a_google_blacklisting_gocompare_update.html

    Robin Goad, Research Director, Hitwise

  • http://www.oceanfinance.com pETER sCHMICHAEL

    Noticed that oceanfinance have had similar treatment to gocompare. Been a couple of months now since their penalty, still no movement. Longer penalty than gocompare, what do you think they have done that is constituted as worse than GC?

  • http://www.oceanfinance.com pETER sCHMICHAEL

    Ocean Finance are back.

    100 day penalty for BH tactics. Their SEO has been sacked apparently…..

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  • Mike

    It looks like this could have happened again today!

    Might be too early to jump to conclusions but I’m seeing what looks like a 50 point penalty.

    Be interesting to see if this is definitely the case and what it’s for this time…….

  • Danny

    I think you’re right Mike, seems to have gone for both brand and non-brand terms. Looks liek they’ve upped their PPC spend to try and compensate.

    There’s a good700 odd pages for every car make and model etc within the site, I’m not sure if they’re still buying links though?

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  • http://www.shanebrown.co.uk shane

    Just googled this after someone mentioned it on an A4U forum post. I know the blog post is 2 years old, but does anybody know how they “removed” the penalty, as they are now ranking again.

    Surely you can’t remove it by adding more links – thats what caused the issue to begin with?

  • http://www.doggiesolutions.co.uk Chris

    I lost page rank for 1 of my websites 2 weeks ago, don’t know why but how do I fix it?

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