Price comparison website gocompare.com has recently suffered a severe Google penalty.
After capturing the top position in Google's search engine results for the lucrative term "car insurance" gocompare.com have been reprimanded by Google and now appear in the depths of page 7 for the "car insurance" keyword.
The apparent reason for this is gocompare.com used link buying methods including pay-per-post blogging to game the Google algorithm and lift themselves to the top. Such attempts to manipulate search results are frowned upon by Google (as they go against their search engine guidelines) and it appears action has now been taken.
The decision by Google to impose this penalty on gocompare.com has caused quite a stir within the online community with sites such as hitwise and several leading SEO (search engine optimisation) bloggers lining up to give their opinion.
To find out more about the Google paid links penalty suffered by gocompare.com read the articles below to discover why this has happened and what this means for gocompare.com:
Hitwise Inteligence - What happens if your site gets 'blacklisted' by Google?
Insiders-View - Gocompare banned from Google
Wired - This is what happens when you mess with Google
Insurance Times - Gocompare plummets on internet search rankings
Information Week - Fear the Google blacklist
Search Engine Land - How a Google slap can hurt hard
Blogstorm - Gocompare suffers big Google penalty
Steak Media - Google penalises Gocompare.com for paid blog posts
E-consultancy - Gocompare feels effects of Google penalty
Adrian Flux - Gocompare car insurance search ban
This is just a sample of the articles that caught my interest over a couple of days. A quick search for "gocompare google penalty" will find many more pieces that may well be worth a read.
News of this penalty has unsurprisingly spread through the online word like wildfire. If you have found or written an article on the subject leave a link in the comments for others to read and share.
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