Why The AA doesn't rank for car insurance

The AA is a pretty reputable company in the UK and is an excellent choice if you are looking for some car insurance.

It might surprise you to see that TheAA.com doesn’t rank on the first page when you search for “car insurance” on Google, in fact they are stuck on page 3.

One of the reasons behind this is that they don’t understand the benefits of anchor text, lets look at their linking conditions:

You are not permitted to include a link from your site to our site unless you have agreed to and accepted these Terms and Conditions.The link:

• must be in one or more of the following text link formats: ‘the AA’, ‘AA’, ‘The Automobile Association’ or ‘www.theAA.com’;
• must, when used in body text, appear in the same font and font size as text in which it appears on your site; and
• may direct traffic to any page on our site.

Your Rights

You may remove the link from your site at any time. To enable us to keep our records up to date, please notify us by email at customer.services@the AA.com in the event that you remove the link from your site.

Well, I seem to have broken some of those in my link above so lets see what happens.

BY Patrick Altoft AT 1:50pm ON Thursday, 18 October 2007

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+