Don`t want to get blacklisted? Don`t game the system

Recently, Google picked up the fact that insurance comparison website GoCompare.com site was using irregular links, causing it to plunge down the rankings.

Robin Goad, head of research at Hitwise, explains that the current trend in ‘car insurance` searches increased the share of searches by 31% since the end 29th December.

In January, GoCompare.com was at the top of the SERPs for the term `car insurance`, drawing 49% of the all search traffic from the term. The term accounted for more traffic even than the brand term ‘go compare`.

That was until the Google police got hold of them and blacklisted them, causing GoCompare.com to go crashing down the listings. By the 13th of February they were on page 7 of the Search Results.

Not surprisingly, Google has declined to comment on the situation, but E-consultancy speculate that the website have in fact been penalised for purchasing paid links.

Upon further investigation, it has been noted that GoCompare.com got hit by a lots of pay-per-blog posts and appear to have some duplicate content issues that Google does not take a liking to either.

By the 9th February, there was an 87% decrease from week ending 26th Jan when it was right at the top of the Serps. This decrease left a gap for Confused.com and Comparethemarket.com to infiltrate the market. These two sites have shown the largest increase in traffic from searches for ‘car insurance` over those last two weeks.

There is no quick fix solution, but this can serve as a warning for other companies. It is essential to ensure that you have a reputable SEO company running your organic search, as that`s the best way to keep within the boundaries, preventing more mess ups like this.

Weinberg reckons that this situation also illustrates that Google is after your paid links and that is what has caused the domain to be removed from the index to begin with. If you break the rules, you will get caught. It`s a fine line, and GoCompare.com has certainly learnt their lesson the hard way.

There is a lot of speculation around blacklisting with very few hard facts. No one knows the exact reason for the GoCompare.com fall. At this point one can only speculate using the information available. Once again, Google is proving that they don`t mess around, and thus keeping all implementations above ground is crucial if you don`t want this to happen to your site. Its 3 weeks on and the GoCompare.com site is still trailing far behind; it`s just not worth it.