I’m not usually given to gloating at others downfall, but the recent Google penalty for GoCompare, probably for paid blog post spamming and massive scale paid link buying. Hitwise estimates that they have lost around 87% of their traffic from the coveted ‘car insurance’ terms – but currently they are not even appearing in results for their own name (apart from paid adverts).

The real message Google is sending out through this slap on the wrist for Gocompare, and a similar one they handed out to MoneySupermarket last year, is that companies buying their way to the top of the Google listings aren’t going to have such an easy ride anymore.

I wonder how much money Gocompare have spent on this link building? Presumably they haven’t yet spent all of the £30 million that esure bunged the ‘independent comparison site’ for marketing.

Sorry if this post is a bit of a minority interest for regular readers, but bear in mind next time you type car insurance into Google how the results may well be skewed towards companies with the largest online marketing budgets.

Dave Wilson on Google+
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