I believe ComparetheMarket are using Tamar for their SEO, and having done a spot of analysis on some of their other clients last year (out of pure jealousy), they do seem to use a lot of grey if not black techniques.

I’d never seen a link farm before checking the backlinks of some of their other insurance clients…

The big question is how have comparethemarket done this? It’s not by being a strong brand or good SEO I think, but I expect by ‘link building’ and lots of them. I estimate they must be spending £20k-£30k per month and at that level their approach can’t be ethical – does anyone know how long it takes Google spot this?

I totally agree, this is extremely frustrating. Google wants people to stay the right side of the white hat/black hat line but then fails to punish sites, like moneyexpert, who blatantly spam their way to the top of the SERPs

Moneyexpert have been top for [mortgages] and [loans] for months now using these unethical tactics and it seems Google is doing nothing about it.

And now they are working their way up for [car insurance] again using the same approach.

@Ernest

If moneyexpert are spamming their way to the top for [car insurance] again don’t you think they deserve their own special entry on the site? Then we can really take a look at their activities.

[car insurance] and [mortgages] are two of the most popular searches in the finance field. Combined we would be looking in excess of 1.5m searches a month. They will be delivering hugely significant traffic numbers through a cloaked page and the spammiest of all spammy link networks.

It would also seem that Google’s reporting facility is pretty much worthless.

And 700k+ completely natural, not paid for in any way, absolutely ethical and wholly white hat backlinks. That’s impressive in anyone’s book.

Have you actually looked at their on-page optimisation for the term [car insurance] which Google is returning as their best result? It’s not targetted to that term at all. Firstly, they’re relying on the Big G to work its synonym magic (they’re using motor insurance). And secondly, this only accounts for about 0.000001% of the page!

The more I look at Google’s search results, the more I lose faith in the ethical, guideline orientated approach. Damn, the Big G is deserving of a huge slap around the chops.

Whatever the case, they can’t stay up there that long. I am amazed they have been permitted to get away with it for as long as they have already.

The high volume of BLs also seems highly suspicious.

I’m amazed MoneyExpert.com are willing to risk their long term brand reputation by using such methods. It wasn’t too long ago that Ocean Finance were hit hard by the big G