You’re also clearly after our top spot via Google for insurance blog. Ha Ha!

If you are then read this post and add your comments Insurance Websites
you could be worth a fortune

It’s not covered that much and your blog is probably the most interesting on the topic I’ve seen.

Cheers for your help and advice – although it’s all sound advice we’ve already done all that. And it’s now been 3 months since the penalisation, in fact there was a point where we disappeared altogether but now we’re back at around page 10.

We did very sharply decide to go down the white hat route soon after penalisation, so that meant that all bought links were cancelled, removed or redirected – and the multi-link banners were taken down.

As far as I understand, that’s pretty much what GoCompare did – they simply played nice with Google and then after 3 months everything was ok. But our penalisation was just short of 3 months ago but there are no signs from Google that it’s about to play-ball.

Is there anything else we’re missing? And if you need any info about this penalisation then just ask – that way we can all probably understand the pattern of penalisations more.

To get reincluded
1. Clean up your blackhat techniques
2. Apply to Google for reconsideration Google Reconsideration
3. Contact Google via the webmaster console
4. Sumbitting a Google sitemap can help.
Further info here: Reinclusion How To

This should remove the penalty but now you need to start ranking properly, providing good content, a service to customers, natural inbound links etc.

At the time of writing this post we currently rank somewhere around 100th for the term “car insurance” which is the result of a penalisation by Google for buying links – I know it’s naughty but it wasn’t my decision.

The site was re-launched in January 2008 at which point we ranked on page 3 for the term “car insurance” and we were climbing. It was at that point that we decided to start purchasing links in bulk (before the GoCompare and Kwik Fit ban). In fact if you goto market leap you can see that there are a few huge leaps in the number of our backlinks.

Anyway, a few weeks after the GoCompare ban we too were penalised and started ranking on page 8, a month or two later we started ranking on page 11 – and then we pretty much dissappeared.

For most of our other terms we still ranked well but we had done a multi-link banner across a few sites which was similar to how “BestDealInsurance” used to have their banners. For all the terms we used in that banner we got penalised, so we quickly concluded that the ban was due to that banner so it got taken down a few days after the ban. We also removed all of the purchased links at the same time.

So my question is this, how long can we expect to be penalised for? Since the ban we’ve had to shift the focus of our company to concentrate on other insurance products coupled with cashback, so ranking for the term “car insurance” isn’t of major importance to us, but it would be nice to understand when Google is going to have us back, or if it’s permanently given us the cold shoulder.

Yes paid text links and ad networks are bad, so wouldn’t this blog with all its very qualified readers around the insurance/SEO industry be the perfect place to brainstorm ideas to move forward? Whats the future going to look like?

hers one for you – http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=yes+insurance&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a

Discuss….

With regards to Aaron – What does he know about search

The positive side, I can let him do the hard work and i’ll take a good percentage of the brand traffic.