Money Expert Spam Their Way to 1st Page of Google

by Ernest on April 2, 2008

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.

Money Expert Spam Google

{ 1 trackback }

Is Google Colour Blind? | USERAGENT.ca
April 17, 2008 at 6:52 am

{ 56 comments… read them below or add one }

muhaha September 12, 2008 at 10:10 pm

You’z ALL suckaz!

half year later and still goin’ strooong.

you whine about ME cause you suck.
If you out-ranked ‘em for similar terms, you’d be silent.

John J October 29, 2008 at 10:02 am

Well, today they disapeared from the UK SERPS for the term “creditcards”. And also they puchased a company called broadband-help and they were 3rd for the term broadband. Thats now gone from the SERPS.

SirBigWig November 4, 2008 at 4:11 pm

Now disappeared for the term “car insurance”, is this the beginning on of the end for ME?

Cat Fish December 18, 2008 at 4:07 pm

The SEO for Money Expert is Steve Love

Insurance Blogger March 18, 2009 at 6:51 pm

Hi
I got an email this morning from Moneysupermarket.com asking to buy links on my blog.

Should I report them to Google

PS like the new blog!

Insurance Guide January 21, 2010 at 4:21 pm

It is dissapointing to see these big online brands cheating the system, faking insurance advice – Yet people still use them!

Leave a Comment