Money Expert Spam Their Way to 1st Page of Google

Some may be surprised, some may not. But following our debates about the risks and rewards of buying links and spamming the search engines, Money Expert have rocketed onto the first results page of Google for the term car insurance.

Regardless of which colour hat you wear, you can’t help but be amazed at the speed with which they have returned this high result in Google. This afternoon, we’ve seen them at positions 3 and 10 – depending on the direction of the wind – from absolutely nowhere (which in SEO terms is beyond the top 3 positions or pages).

We all know that Money Expert have been buying links. They know it. You know it. Google even knows it. And while we wait for the day to come when Google manages to automate the penalisation of link buying, there may be a few other tricks we should be keeping an eye on.

Look at the page URL from the search engine result below. It is suggesting that they’re sending you to www.moneyexpert.com/Insurance/Home.aspx. If you were to copy and paste this URL into your browser, that’s exactly where you end up. However, if you click on the Google results, you end up here: http://www.moneyexpert.com/Insurance/Google/home.aspx which produces a different page altogether. Serving different content to the search engine and the customer. Naughty, naughty.

They’ve been doing this on their mortgages and loans key phrases for a little while. Basically, if you disable cookies you get a 302 redirecting to itself. Money Expert are looking for the referrer to include a particular key phrase in ”q=car+insurance” for example and redirect the customer. It appears that this way, they can focus all their link juice through to one page and climb the rankings for multiple keywords.