Yesterday - in the space of a few hours - the same datacentre showed a huge variation in 1st page results. Morethan, Authonetinsurance.co.uk and bullhorn all came onto the first page, with Virgin Money and Insureango dropping onto the third. This morning, Kwikfit - the site apparently penalised for link buying - was back in at 25, with morethan and autonetinsurance back on page 2 and 3 respectively.

What is going on? Are Google simply testing the serp or is this a part of a wider algorithmic shift?

It got me thinking - who is this…?

Well - pretty easy to find out… “from conservatories to wind turbines”

Oh look! 541 sites when I check it with exactly this copy - all linking to a certain set of clients… Diy.com (B&Q), Tesco Finance, Endseigh, Direct Line.

Who carries out SEO for these… None other than the one and only Tamar!

Come on guys, You’re a good agency. You gotta be smarter than this. Look what happened to a certain Latitude…

Some great conversion taking place on this search blog over the last week - Rex’s comment about better a day as a Lion than life as a sheep - Well Go Compare’s life as a sheep is over. They are the lion of the serps once more!

We at Not So Natural are professional SEO bods. Rankings are our bread and butter and, in some of our cases, our lives!! Since the dawn of the most famous search engine, links have been king; and as a result, links are our main method of gaining an advantage for our clients. If all were born equal, our link strategy would be - ‘do as Matt Cutt’s says - create something mega useful and watch your link pop explode like you were the new facebook. But let’s face it. All are not equal, and neither is Google.

While Matt writes posts subsuming the best way of gaining links without purchasing or reciprocating, Matt fails to really embrace the key discussion of what links are really about.

So perhaps thats where we’ll start. The how of gaining links?

This site has attempted to show over the last few months how all are not born equal! The top 10 for all our key high traffic-driving phrases are full of sites buying or artificially manipulating links. Matt suggests; ‘place a pdf writer, an email spam filter or tool which makes nice ANSI Compliant warning signs to gain you links’. We couldn’t agree with you more Matt! Being useful is the ultimate way to gain popularity. If I were trying to rank for ‘pdf writer’ - great idea. I’d place a free, easy to use pdf writer on my site.

But what if i want to rank for ‘cheap flights’? Would you suggest a pdf writer for that? Could I rank better for ‘car insurance’ if people looking for car insurance found they could download a useful spam filter? One thinks not. Take a real life example; to rank for cheap flights, should I sell a cheaper, better flight than everyone else? Of course not. Build a fun cheap flight game or risque flight attendant strip show! Yeah - cos like that’s why they are number 1…!

We couldn’t agree more Matt - This is exactly the kind of sites Search Engines should be placing at the top - sites which have useful content. Sites which sell the best product or put the most effort into providing the user with a useful service.

OK, so let’s look take it from a slightly different angle Matt. Why gain links?

Let’s say the top 100 for ‘car insurance’ stop buying links and all make a really cool application or two which people find useful. All sell car insurance at the same price (or just compare each other’s!). All have the same keyword density, same Titles, similar content and lovely Meta Descriptions. All really are equal. Who do you choose? Who should be in the top 3? Well Google…

You use their link popularity to differentiate of course. But how many better ways are there to differentiate? Perhaps your toolbar or Google analytics data? Yahoo’s latest ’semantic innovation’? Could this be the answer? How about you get a bit more proactive and use some of your vast profits to put some human intervention into your highest traffic driving areas?

I guess what we are saying is; Google’s very method of differentiating between sites is flawed. Using Links to determine rankings is old and blatantly open to abuse. Why continue to use such a method so open to fraud?

Google - listen to Matt. He is on to something. He is correct, not because these ideas make for good Link Juice - but because these ideas make for great sites. Matt’s ideas are the fundamentals upon which Google’s power was born. Useful sites had more links than useless sites; hence sites with more links should rank higher than sites with less. Now, there is a multi-million £/$/€ trade in buying and selling the very method on which you based this usefulness. Links.

Perhaps now Google, links are not very useful at all!

So in this long winded way, we have reached a conclusion. What do we recommend you do – practically – to increase your link equity, while Google continues to use this method to judge whether you are good or not?

Always build a site which is useful. Always try to be the best site out there at what you do. Build that USP and rise above your competitors. Think outside the box to generate new ideas and listen to your networks - what they want and what they say about you. But above all BE REALISTIC. While there are people cheating the system, don’t ignore this. While links gain rankings and rankings are achieved through acquisition; keep up with your competition and buy the b***ards! Compliment your site with paid as well as natural links. Be inventive with your tactics and always adopt more than one; but don’t overuse any.

Until Google changes, we’re all in with the same chance of a penalty. Keep in your mind that Google kicks out the likes of Go Compare and Kwik Fit, but look at the reasons. Abuse one method and you’ll go down. Equally, fail to participate, fail to rank – and you may as well have suffered a penalty for abuse. Better to try and fail than never try at all…

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Update 27th Feb

And so the trend continues. Yesterday, MoneySupermarket were briefly 3rd, whilst today it was the turn of Compare the Market (this morning) before Direct Line moved up to be 3rd for Car Insurance this afternoon. Who will it be tomorrow? Perhaps Confused? Has anyone else seen such movement in any of the other SERPs? Certainly not in our other big 3 ‘cheap flights’, ‘digital camera’ and ‘mortgage’…

“It needs insurance plans? That such to know Kwik-fit Insurance? There you it will be able to find one infinity of products and services that will become its more easy life. If you have a car,”

It was only a matter of time with crap like that as a link strategy one thinks!

So - which Latitude client is next? Come’on guys - smarten up! Blog links like that are gonna get you wiped out!

Car Insurance and Uswitch: Taking Uswitch as our example here. Uswitch have always done well in the Google serps but have recently become much stronger in the car insurance serp. They show fewer signs of artificial link growth than say the likes of Endsleigh or Directline - but have many anchor text rich links from within the Scripps Group. This includes sites like upmystreet, shopzilla and many of Scripps’ TV network domains such as the DIY Network.

Just take a look at the footer for each of the Scripps sites - blatant use of anchor text rich links to specific pages on the key network sites and yes - you guessed it - almost every site links to the car insurance page on uswitch, currently ranking 6 in Google for ‘car insurance’.

Mortgage and whatmortgage: Again, here we see a site doing particularly well for a core term by leveraging their parent company’s sites. WhatMortgage is part of the Charterhouse communications group and currently ranks at 9 for ‘mortgage’. A quick scroll down to the footer reveals, yes thats right, a huge block of anchor text heavy links to other sites in the group.

Cheap Flights and Cheapflights: The number 1 ranking site for cheap flights in Google is Cheapflights. Purely down to the domain name? Maybe. Or is this more than the consequent anchor text rich links courtesy of such a great domain name? Take a look at the footer. Cross links to the foreign versions of the site. Take a look at International page and subsequent foreign domains - all crosslinking back to the main UK and US domains with keyword rich anchor text.

Is this penalisable? Are these forms of links underhand and little more than good old link spam or simply good use of internal resource. Who is the bigger network spammer or are all forms just as bad? If Big G were to find a way of algorithmically detecting paid links or started aggressively targeting networks of links, how might it treat sites such as these?

According to Hitwise, GoCompare were receiving 17.49% of search traffic for ‘car insurance’ before the ban. Now they are receiving 2.31% for the same term.

It appears however, if you scroll through the serps, they are 51st for most terms - e.g. car insurance. Could this simply be a plus 50 penalty?

Anyone want to place bets on when they will return?