Jun

27

dot insurance - go.compare, money.supermarket, conf.used

Filed Under Miscellaneous, SEO | 6 Comments

The internet world is changing… ICANN, which manages top level domain names amongst other things has approved brand name web addresses. What does this mean? It means you could have admiral.insurance or go.compare as a web address.

Now for the geeky bit…
This will excite “domainers” who buy and sell domains for a living as they can get in quick and set up an auction or hold on to killer domains for a massive sell out like business.com ($7.5million).

It will also excite the spammers and those that pray on typos as this opens up an new avenue of phishing for them (think about a wildcard on a *.co.u.k)

Check out more information at the BBC or Yahoo

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Jun

23

Anyone seen any insiders around here?!

Filed Under Miscellaneous | 21 Comments

It has been far too long since our last post - funny how a little thing called work tends to get in the way of everything else! And it hasn’t escaped our attention that the SEO posts on here tend to get many more comments than anything else. It seems as though we’ve attracted a fairly strong SEO crowd one way or another.

We’re interested to see who’s still about (roll call with comments please) and see if there is any interest to develop the blog further than the repetitive SEO chat. Of course we won’t abandon the SEO side of things but variety is the spice of life after all …even if we do work in the uninspiring insurance arena!!

It might also be a good time for the many lurkers to make themselves known and see if they want to steer the topics in a particular direction.

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Jun

4

Tescocompare Home Insurance Launches at Tescocompare.com

Filed Under Insurance Aggregators | 12 Comments

Tescocompare.com the RBS owned comparison site has launched its home insurance comparison service. We’ve managed to get access to their private beta but it will be available to the public by the time you read this. Tesco Compare are clearly on a domination march across the financial services world with comparison products soon to launch for mortgages and utilities.

With such a good brand, they’re sure to do well… watch this space.

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May

30

Insurance Merchant Search from Google

Filed Under Marketing Insurance, PPC, SEO | 7 Comments

Google is set to launch its Merchant Search application. Whilst they are trialling this for secured loans, it will definitely get some attention if they release this to the wider population. Financial services like loans, credit cards and insurance are highly competitive. This will make some people very scared indeed.

Compare Secured Loans

Compare Lenders

http://www.google.co.uk/help/merchantsearchbeta/faq.html

http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/help/merchantsearchbeta/review.html 

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Apr

16

The Butterfly Effect - How to Game Google and Win

Filed Under Insurance Aggregators | 54 Comments

Our posts on the gocompare ban and subsequent reinclusion have generated some interest. As we soon realised, GoCompare supplemented their SEO loss with a direct increase in PPC traffic. Hitwise have kindly provided us with proof - the butterfly effect:

Gocompare traffic source

Here’s how they ranked over time for [car insurance]:

GoCompare Ranking over time

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Apr

14

Google’s “Previous Query” Technique Spreads

Filed Under PPC, SEO | 10 Comments

If you’re not up to speed with the Google Previous Query technique, it’s quite simple - and the name says it all really. Put simply, Google is starting to display their advertising placements based on the key phrase you’ve searched for and the phrase(s) previous to that.

As an example, a customer will search for [travel] and then [insurance]. The second search will produce advertising results for insurance but with a slant or higher emphasis on those bidding on travel insurance terms. It’s fairly easy to see why  Google are approaching it this way. Click to continue

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Apr

3

MoneyNet no longer the king of life insurance

Filed Under SEO | 15 Comments

Perhaps we’ve been focusing too much on the car insurance key phrases of late, as this one managed to pass us by. It appears as though MoneyNet are no longer ranking on the first page for life insurance. We’ve known BestDealInsurance have been up there for a while on this highly lucrative key phrase but we didn’t notice the drop of MoneyNet life insurance from top/first page down to page thee and relative obscurity until very recently. Click to continue

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Apr

2

Money Expert Spam Their Way to 1st Page of Google

Filed Under SEO | 54 Comments

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).

Click to continue

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Mar

28

SEO Link Buyers - are you naughty?

Filed Under SEO | 28 Comments

Black Hat Link BuyingWe’ve seen some interesting fluctuations in the Google SERPs for financial sites over the last few months. To name a few, the gocompare ban and subsequent reinclusion, the kwik-fit ban, the bestdealinsurance ban and of course, the short-lived moneysupermarket ban and the confused ban.

In most cases, this has been a result, we believe, of link buying. Some varied from the subtle to the downright blatant (and possibly stupid). Our readers have been split between whether this has been beneficial to the company in terms of income and reputation. It certainly highlights the tactics used by the SEO agencies.

I don’t think many would disagree that the top 20 for G: [car insurance] all indulge in a little link “building”. I think we could go as far as saying that most pay for links.

Well, we know we have a lot of SEOs here, also a few company directors, marketers, etc. So, what’s your tactic, let us know in the survey below.

Do you buy links as part of your SEO strategy?
View Results
On what side of the fence do you sit?
View Results

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Mar

27

GoCompare are back in Google for Car Insurance

Filed Under Insurance Aggregators, SEO | 18 Comments

Gocompare handcuffs releasedAre their recent ban  on GoCompare.com (actually a +50 penalty) GoCompare.com are back in the Google SERPs for [car insurance]. They were given a penalty for what appeared to be very unsubtle blackhat link building. GoCompare used the PaidPosts technique to pay for inbound links on blogs across the internet.

After a stern beating from Google (the penalty lasted about 2months), they’re now back.

G: [car insurance]

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