They have a large number of links from sites like the http://www.timesonline.co.uk. These appear to link through to the relevant Times Online branded page on http://www.moneysupermarket.com, however if the browser or spider does not accept cookies and cannot run JavaScript they are permanently redirected to the Moneysupermarket version of the relevant page complete with the moneysupermarket URL. (which is the one currently ranking in the search results.)

So as an example this URL contains several links to MS.
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/money/insurance/

The link with the text “Life Assurance” links through an intermediate script:
http://www.moneysupermarket.com/link.asp?Section=term&Source=TIM

This script accepts two parameters, the first appears to be the source of the referral in this case “TIM” (times online) the section parameter appears to be used to tell the script where to permantly redirect to on the MS site.

This is the interesting part If like the majority of internet users you accept cookies and run JavaScript you’ll be 301 redirected to this URL:
URL 1: http://www.moneysupermarket.com/Termassurancep/Default.asp

If however your a search engine spider or user without cookies and JavaScript you’ll be permantly redirected to this URL:
URL 2: http://www.moneysupermarket.com/termassurance/

This of course means the cache of URL 1 actually shows the content of URL 2:

http://209.85.135.104/search?sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fwww.moneysupermarket.com%2FTermassurancep%2FDefault.asp

Forgive me if i’m wrong here but that’s cloaking for search engine benefit, and it’s not cloaking in order to keyword stuff the page it’s cloaking to gain links.

I wonder whether Google will bother to clamp down on them? It’ll prove whether the Confused and MoneySupermarket issues were a warning or a sign of treatment which all link buyers should expect.

The marketing team at Confused, while being extremely effective, have rarely needed to be heavily hands on with Google. I’d guess that this contrasts hugely with say moneysupermarket and definetly Gocompare.com.

This in part is due to the length of time that they have had high rankings on Google but mainly down to their reliance on their SEO company.

A lot of companies rely heavily, maybe too heavily, on their SEO companies to get high Google rankings and don’t understand what is really involved in attaining those positions. I appreciate that naievity (sp?) is no excuse, but maybe Google’s first port of call to cleaning up the rankings should be to consult with the SEO agencies as to what will happen if optimisation methods aren’t corrected (this may already have been done).

Having previously been part of Confused.com from it’s lauch to very recently, I’d frankly be amazed if they’d noticed that they’d been dropped from Google until the following day and even more amazed if they’d ever read I-V.

Also, confused.co.uk was acquired last year for nowhere nearly as much as people might think.