Feb
22
Kwik Fit Insurance Banned by Google
Filed Under SEO |
Kwik Fit Insurance has been dropped by Google. For presumably shady tactics, the kwik-fit-insurance.com domain has been penalised by the search engine giant. We’ll update with more information when it becomes available.
Comments
17 Comments so far
Hot on the heels of GoCompare, another Latitude client gets the boot. Interesting. Clear sign G don’t like blog spam ey boys!
@SEOguru …but they’re still no close to detecting other paid for links. Imagine the chaos!!
Interestingly if you do a search for ‘Kwik Fit SEO’ the top result is an article/testimonial on Latitude’s site.
If you click to read it… it has gone! Spooky. Luckily Google’s Cache still has a version available.. for now.
@Ernest - can i be smug knowing that i was the first to notice this one?
Cached for me?
http://209.85.129.104/search?sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.kwik-fitinsurance.com%2F
Maybe penalty, but not ban.
@Creased, you get the kudos. But it does suggest that you have nothing better to do.
@Richard Hearne (and everyone else who’s mentioned), it is of course a penalty rather than a ban but why ruin a good story with the facts. Plus, this headline is better(!)
Totally unrelated but is anyone else seeing www.q4.com in position 3 for car insurance on Google?
Quite a rapid rise over the last few weeks don’t you think.
I’m seeing Q4 3rd for car insurance too!!! Anyone know who does their SEO?
I’m also seeing Q4 across a number of data centres. I’ver been watching them for a long while now and they’ve had a sudden surge in in-bound links.
Although there are tonnes from one domain (audifans.net), they’ve managed to spread a fair few paid for links across a number of car related sites. But my favourite has to be whoisjeffmills.com. What a complete american loser (I get distracted easily!)
Back to Kwik Fit, does Google actually ’sand box’ these days? there is an article wikipedia about it.
Worth checking out.
It looks like there is hope for GoCompare/Kwik Fit - Asda is appearing back in my DCs Top 10 for ‘car insurance’. They were dropped last year for dark-grey-hat techniques. At first glance their black links now seem mostly strong and relevant.
@Creased
What about Asda’s hidden text links on http://www.michigandaily.com/. If you have a search in the page source you will find a nice link to asdafinance in a section containing a using “display: none;”
Do you think they are still using black hat techniques?
Well thats Search latitude for you!
The latest to feel the Google Slap - Best Deal. On my DC this morning they have been dumped into the mid 40s for their top terms.
They were #1 for ‘home insurance’ - i had noticed their backlinks were in the form of dodgy html banners on really irrelevant websites of all languages - so i’m not surprised.
They did dip into the top 10 for car insurance a few times over the last few weeks - but I doubt this will make the headlines like GC did!
@Creased - I noticed that too but they’ve managed to maintain their top spot for [life insurance] for the time being. Did their backlink anchor text revolve mainly around car and home or is this a sign of a manual edit whereby life insurance key phrases simply don’t receive enough traffic for intervention?
@Ernest, @Creased,
Check out the anchor text and IBLs they have been targeting on the bestdealinsurance ban page.
lol, latitude those muppets from wigan or wherever got them whacked
[…] doesn’t yet seem to be the case with Kwik Fit apparently suffering a minus 50 penalty after aggressively trying to rank their kwik-fit-insurance.com domain. […]