Why Google Penalised Gocompare.com

Our previous post covered the news that price comparison website Gocompare.com had suffered the embarrassment of being penalised by marketing leading search engine Google – we even listed 10 of the best articles discussing the topic.

At the time of writing Gocompare.com still rank between position 50 and 70 on Google for the keyword car insurance and are ranked similarly for their brand name Gocompare.

Many people have asked why Google decided to take these measures and the answer given by many in the SEO arena is “paid links”. In truth it didn’t take a lot of working out as Chief Executive Hayley Parsons admitted it.

To touch briefly on the topic of link building; when you perform a search on Google they use a highly secretive algorithm to judge where each page in its index should rank in the search results for that keyword. One area of that algorithm is back links.

In simple terms these links act as a votes, the more “quality” links you have the more likely you are to appear higher up in the results.

Many sites use SEO (search engine optimisation) techniques to improve their rankings and for many this involves link building – the process of purposefully generating back links to accomplish a goal of higher Google rankings.

This is big business with keywords such as car insurance potentially being worth millions of pounds in revenue. As such some sites are tempted to bend (or even break) the rules to climb the search results and dine at the top table.

Google fights a Highlander-like battle with webmasters who try to manipulate their search results through link building and continually work to tweak and change their algorithms to prevent the quality of search results being diluted by link spammers.

So What Did Gocompare.com Actually Do?

Clearly they were tempted to bend the rules to try and compete with more established price comparison sites like confused.com (ironically the company from which Gocompare.com was born).

Gocompare.com used black-hat (that means unethical) link building methods to fool Google into thinking they were a popular site for car insurance.

They did this through the use of Pay Per Post Blogging. With this method blog owners sign up to sites such as payperpost.com and offer a service whereby a site can purchase an entry on their blog, usually in the form of a review, which contains a back link. Seeing these back links build up Google rewards you with a higher ranking.

At least that is how things used to be…

You see Google doesn’t like people trying to make a mockery of their listings and once in a while (not often enough for some) they fight back and give some one a good hard slap.

The trouble with Pay Per Post back links is they are very easy to spot. The patterns are too easy for search engines to identify. As they are a clear ploy to boost search engine success Google has decided that Gocompare.com overstepped the mark and they were promptly penalised, disappearing from the holy grail of #1 for car insurance.

For some sites the risk of a Google penalty is an acceptable one. The short term revenue benefits from topping the results for car insurance are surely plentiful, and if you do get knocked down then so beit.

But for sites with ambitions of long term, continued success the risks must be weighed up against the benefits. Google is only getting bigger and having a presence in their results is becoming a prerequisite of any marketing strategy.

Whilst licking their wounds Gocompare.com face a real decision, find another way to climb the results quickly and risk a permanent ban or rebuild slowly, abide by rules and await Google’s forgiveness.

And for those who might be considering using Pay Per Post or other questionable link building strategies a word of caution; the consequences, it seems could be extremely severe.