http://notsonatural.co.uk THE forum for open discussion of search engine ranking techniques Wed, 14 May 2008 07:54:29 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en The last couple of days have seen huge changes in the Google car insurance search result, with many sites dipping in and out from pages 1-3. 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 ... http://notsonatural.co.uk/2008/05/14/massive-google-car-insurance-serp-changes-13th-may-2008/ Check out Dave Naylor's Comments about cheeky link building methodology... 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), ... http://notsonatural.co.uk/2008/03/29/tamar-link-building-methodology/ So this morning, its good to see a familiar face in Google for the phrase 'Car Insurance'. Yes - Go Compare are back in the top 10 at 6th for car insurance. That's less than 2 months in the Google Wilderness. Some great conversion taking place on this search blog over ... http://notsonatural.co.uk/2008/03/27/google-liftes-gocompare-from-sin-bin/ So this week's big news has been Matt Cutt's reposting of his 'link bait' ideas, which have seen many contrasting and controversial views being aired in his comment section. In a recent comment on this site, the question was posed - 'what do we think is a good method of ... http://notsonatural.co.uk/2008/03/15/the-great-natural-link-debate/ What is going on? This week insure and go, tesco finance, direct line, endsleigh, q4 and today uswitch have been 3rd in google for 'car insurance'. What are google doing? Are they testing to pre-empt a big algorithm change? ----- Update 27th Feb And so the trend continues. Yesterday, MoneySupermarket were briefly 3rd, ... http://notsonatural.co.uk/2008/02/23/3rd-place-for-car-insurance-in-google/ As reported by Insiders View this morning, Latitude's Kwik Fit Insurance have been penalised (not really banned guys) by Google, and are just beneath Go Compare for 'car insurance' at 70th. A quick Google blog search reveals the extent of Kwik Fit's spammy behaviour. Check out this snippet from one ... http://notsonatural.co.uk/2008/02/22/another-latitude-client-bites-the-dust/ So ok - a for-instance question. If one large parent company has a large number of sites, is it ok to cross link between one another? Could this be seen as spam? To what extent could this be seen as link spam - i.e. where can the line be drawn ... http://notsonatural.co.uk/2008/02/20/is-cross-linking-between-company-sites-penalisable/ Check out this blogpost from Hitwise Research Director Robert Goade. Very interesting traffic analysis of Gocompare and the other big players for car insurance since GCs Google penalty. 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 ... http://notsonatural.co.uk/2008/02/13/gocompare-traffic-drop-following-google-penalty/ Hmm, So today I noticed all of Greenlight's CNIDR spammy link network of subdomains appear to have been banned from google. Google appear to have been doing a good job recently at penalising spam. However, The Fool, Alliance and Leicester, Asda Finance and Natwest etc still rank well in major serps ... http://notsonatural.co.uk/2008/02/07/greenlight-link-network-banned/ So, finally it would appear Google have taken action against link spam and banned Go Compare - the spammiest of link spammers. Go Compare appear to, not only have been kicked out for car insurance, but don't even rank for their name. It appears however, if you scroll through the ... http://notsonatural.co.uk/2008/01/29/go-compare-kicked-out-of-google/