Insiders View

Advertising Standards upholds Moneysupermarket

George — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 09:00:22 +0000

Moneysupermarket have won a minor battle with The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) and Go Compare over misleading advertising. The debate is over the number of insurers that are compared and how the pricing structure works.

In short, MoneySupermarket won. However, it’s all largely rubbish as so many of these sites pretend to compare 105% (sic) of the market, to save you £500 on your policy or that they visit 200 insurers.

Sure, you can argue it both ways but most comparison sites just want to put huge bold marketing claims in front of eyeballs. Comparing insurers, schemes, brokers, underwriters all yield different numbers - I doubt the public has any idea what’s going on.

Which brings us back to brand…again Moneysupermarket win the numbers game:

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Something in the air at Tesco Compare

Ernest — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 14:30:45 +0000

We could be way off the mark here but both George and I have picked up on a little, unexplainable shift at TescoCompare in the last week or so. As with most of the readers and contributors on Insiders View, we deal with many different companies and people in the insurance industry on a fairly regular basis. Although things seem to be hitting their usual lul as we all pick our paths through November and December, we get the feeling that Tesco Compare are up to something or there’s a significant change on the horizon.

Does anyone know what Tesco Compare are up to?! We can all see they’ve expanded the Tesco Compare comparison products via the easy route of white label solutions with established entities in each field. Not an unwise move you would have thought. But this isn’t anything new and if anything suggests stability rather than any major change or radical product development.

What magic is Paul Daniels cooking up?!

Update: And no, we’re not talking about the TescoCompare van insurance launch (we updated the TescoCompare suppliers table to reflect this).

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MoneyExpert dropped from Google for credit card spamming

George — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 14:50:54 +0000

MoneyExpert.com have been dropped from Google for the term [credit cards]. They have held the top spot for some time, partly by purchasing links from blogs such as:
www.rusplaneta.com, www.wutang-corp.com, www.diggeek.com, www.firingsquad.com, www.ocia.net and hundreds of others, all with the anchor text of credit cards.

Google have finally taken notice….

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Help Us Create The Insurance Aggregator CheatSheet

George — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 09:28:00 +0000

I’ve been working on an Aggregator cheatsheet for a while but the oppressive crunch has kept me away from my duties on Insiders View. So, I’m debating to release my work in its semi-state - for you, the readers to improve? What do you think?

So, what does that mean? Well, as a teaser below, you can see the current state of the document. My idea is to release it here, on Insiders View for all to comment and use the ‘collective’ knowledge to help fill it in.

Comments very welcome. George

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How will The New Google Browser affect our industry?

George — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 12:23:17 +0000

Google Chrome Logo

If you’re not up to speed, Google is launching its version of a web browser dubbed Google Chrome. It will compete head to head with Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Safari and Opera (plus all the others!). It’s based on the WebKit rendering engine. Who cares about this? Well…

We’re in the insurance industry and we tend to focus on SEO, aggregators and hopefully ethics. But we’re going to delve a little in to how this may hit companies where it hurts - conversion. This is where it gets a little technical…The people that make these sites work, the people behind the scenes that code, develop, design and test may well have a lot of work on their hands. Why? Because, if the bold claims that this will surpass Firefox usage by the end of the year are true, this puts a new requirement on these sites - to make sure that they are compatible with Google Chrome.

Many sites (the Admiral group used to be appauling) don’t work in some browsers. This affects conversions of customers. Not by much but by enough. Particularly when aggregator sites are getting bad press, small differences in conversion can have a big impact on the bottom line.

It’s due to launch in a few hours 1800GMT - let’s hope your sites work in this new browser if you want to keep your customers.

—
As an aside, affiliates should be a little worried. Google Chrome includes the Greenborder technology which essentially strips all tracks of affiliate sites.

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TescoCompare launches utility comparison - gas, electricity compare

George — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 09:26:28 +0000

TescoCompare has launched its utility comparison engine. Or should I say Xelector have won the white label deal!

So, This is where we stand:

TescoCompare Products

Product	Who Built It?
Home Insurance	In House
Car Insurance	In House
Van Insurance	The Bike Insurer
Bike Insurance	The Bike Insurer
Mortgages	London and Country Mortgages
Utilities	Xelector
Credit Cards	Xelector
Loans	Xelector
(Data)	Defaqto

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Bullhorn up for Sale - Bullhorn.co.uk the comparison site selling

George — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 16:21:37 +0000

Insurance comparison site Bullhorn.co.uk is up for sale. Possibly. We’re not sure whether it’s a marketing exercise but they’ve got a press release out. Matt Johnson from Bullhorn gave us an exclusive by revealing the details in a comment on one of our posts. Matt, we’re waiting for your take on the story - answer your emails!

The story goes that they don’t have the cash to continue marketing. That hasn’t stoppped them bidding on Adwords though(!).

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How Not to Improve Search Engines

George — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 14:16:07 +0000

Cuil (presumably pronounced “Cool”) has attempted to take on Google as the new search engine:

Cuil’s goal is to solve the two great problems of search: how to index the whole Internet—not just part of it—and how to analyze and sort out its pages so you get relevant results.

I’m not quite sure it’s there yet with this rather jolly search (see screenshot) where the first result sees Gocompare stealing the limelight with their logo. But, the link goes to Q4.com!

Cuil Search Results

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Spam the search engines from Within with Google Knol

George — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 09:11:32 +0000

Google’s release of Knol is already getting some good coverage. As expected, it’s not long before people start to spam the pages.
Examples:
Excellent Anchor Text Usage:
http://knol.google.com/k/ian-wright/life-insurance/3kqeus4rqskvq/3?locale=en#
Promotions of text links: http://knol.google.com/k/ojal-suthar/top-5-jobs-that-need-life-insurance/bocfh5g6tzdk/2#

White-Hats: Think of a way to produce some authority content. The usual rules apply, it’s a war(!). We try to even the playing fields with information.
Black-Hats: Spam away! The duplicate content issues I believe are still not fixed so you could get a Knol page indexed above your competitors with exactly the same content. Then just switch the links over to your site.

P.S. The page is set to no-follow but that doesn’t stop other benefits including those above.

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Beat your Competitors with Yahoo Search Bug

George — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 14:30:04 +0000

A new Yahoo Directory bug shows sites hosted or ‘associated with’ yours. What you can use this for:

Finding spam link rings
Finding out which sites link to one another
Seeing whether a site ‘powers’ another
Identifying how your competitors get so many inbound links

Try it out:

http://search.yahoo.com/search/dir?ei=UTF-8&p=gocompare

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