confused.com dropped by Google for spamming?

by George on May 29, 2007

ConfusedFollowing the moneysupermarket ban a few weeks ago, it looks like Google are cracking down. Confused.com, one of the biggest players in the car insurance arena are nowhere to be seen. After moneysupermarket’s demise on the 11th May, Google are obviously looking at the [car insurance] serps for potential spammers.

However, confused may have done nothing nefarious in this case. It looks like their purchase of confused.co.uk may have confused (!) the search engines. Both domains return the same content via an HTTP 200 OK. This could be the reason for a manual review, alerting the duplicate content filters. Unless they want to do something different with the domain, most SEO advice suggests a redirect from one domain to the other.

This is perhaps not the best timing if Admiral are looking to sell Confused for £700m. Let’s see what happens now….

Related:
Looking for The Confused 1 Million Pound Giveaway?

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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }

Ernest May 29, 2007 at 1:54 pm

Such a simple fix and we all know there are many ways to instantly show the Big G of your intentions. I wonder if the fly on the wall in the MoneySupermarket office managed to fly south into Wales to see what happened in the Confused offices?

They’ll be loosing a heap of traffic at the same time as large valuation figures are being discussed. It’ll show the non-SEO-educated investors exactly how precarious a valuation based on SEO strength can be.

z May 30, 2007 at 8:44 am

It would seem Confused is back in, my results place them at positino 2 for car insurance.

Tron May 30, 2007 at 11:24 am

Yep, I have got them at position 2 now again.

I have just been trying to work out some figures using Hitwise which shows % of demand and Adwords which shows demand number.

According to my calculations, “Car Insurance” gets about 1m searches per month. Does this sound right to you guys, or a bit high?

George May 30, 2007 at 1:09 pm

As reported – back again!
I think the number of [car insurance] searches could be higher:
http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword/suggestions/car%20insurance#results

Ernest May 31, 2007 at 2:19 am

A heavy stench of yank in those stats! As with all keyword tools, they’re not the be trusted when looking at them with UK eyes.

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