Jan

31

Search Engine Spammers and Cheaters

Filed Under SEO |

There’s a new contender in the car insurance marketplace, currently at No.3 spot for term [car insurance] on Google. They are, www.17to40.co.uk

Now, UK car insurance is a fairly tough market. Each of the major insurers and all the major brokers have significant marketing spend for SEO. In fact, the top ten results can be seen to use fairly major SEO companies.

As of 24th Jan 2006:

Insurer SEO
Direct Line Tamar
Confused Spannerworks
MoneySupermarket Spannerworks Now In-House
Endsleigh Tamar
Elephant Spannerworks
Norwich Union Latitude Neutralize?
Admiral Spannerworks
17to40 Tamar
esure Tamar Spannerworks
Churchill Tamar

However, for 17to40 to suddenly jump to the top ten from absolutely nowhere - it was worth some further investigation. I regularly use Zippy (Thanks DaveN) to look at SERPS and do some domain or keyword research. Click the image below to check out these astounding spammy results. This domain has suddenly achieved success with almost 29,000 backlinks from absolutely nowhere.

17to40 It’s clear that Tamar are using the subdomain of www to be presented as a separate result when in fact
www.17to40.co.uk == www.endsleigh.co.uk. (For a brief time, visiting http://17to40.co.uk took you directly to www.endsleigh.co.uk). They should of course be the same. But, Tamar (you can tell it’s them by looking at the server error message via the IP they have fixed this) are using existing backlinks to count towards two separate domains - sneaky. Is this a new tactic to game Google or have others been doing it? I haven’t seen this before, does anyone have any other examples?

Is this cheating? What do you think?

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19 Comments so far

  1. AJ on February 8, 2007 11:17 am

    I believe Moneysupermarket’s SEO campaign is managed in-house, not via an SEO agency.

  2. George on February 8, 2007 12:58 pm

    Hi AJ, any insiders information there? Or just a hunch?

    This press release shows that they definitely hired Spannerworks as does this CV from a ex-employee.

    Spannerworks also claim:

    Spannerworks retains 90% of our clients into a second year, we think that this is exceptional

    Perhaps Moneysupermarket slipped through the 10% net?

  3. Ernest on February 8, 2007 1:26 pm

    Maybe this is something they didn’t want the boys at Confused to hear about? Thought it was common knowledge myself.

  4. Scott on February 9, 2007 10:28 am

    Spammers there are loads of links from http://www.oxfordstudent.com/

  5. Ernest on February 13, 2007 7:21 pm

    Following Scott’s post, you can see that oxfordstudent.com also carries links to yourhomeinsurance.co.uk. This is another Endsleigh website (look at the small print at the bottom).

    These are probably TLAs. At the very least they’re simply part of the Tamar webmaster network of link spammers!

  6. Antony Mayfield on February 16, 2007 12:00 pm

    Just to say we don’t work with Moneysupermarket at the moment.

    Antony

  7. Henry on February 19, 2007 7:05 am

    Just to clarify the comments posted - we do work with Direct Line, Churchill and Endsleigh, one site only. We do not work with 17to40.co.uk, yourhomeinsurance.co.uk or esure.

    Any thoughts on chooseinsurance.co.uk?

  8. Ernest on February 19, 2007 7:41 am

    Anything in particular about chooseinsurance.co.uk?

    We can all see they have 6,000-odd inbound links and it is without doubt a stunningly beautiful creation/cloak with most of the links coming from simplekindoflife.com and geekyspeaky.com.

    It’s not maxed out with text ads, which you’d normally expect from this sort of creation.

    Crappy table structure, all on page style (maybe that’s the secret to the creative excellence) and possibly a complete waste of my time.

    …so, anything in particular?

  9. Kevin on February 19, 2007 11:18 am

    Is there any sign that Google will take action with 17to40? Is this likely to be the future SEO strategy for all insurers?

  10. George on February 19, 2007 12:32 pm

    UPDATE: There is a follow up post here: Endsleigh - The Spammers

    @Henry, I don’t think we need to worry too much about chooseinsurance.co.uk. It looks like a small outfit with only a few unique domains pointing in. If you want more information, have a look at their contact page or ask their SEO company

    @Kevin, Google may take action if enough of us submit a spam report. Endsleigh could argue that their sites are offering additional information and are not showing duplicate content. But we all know they are trying to game the system.

  11. Dan on February 20, 2007 4:21 am

    It looks like google may have taken action against 17to40.co.uk as it’s no longer ranking for “car insurance”.

    It’s retained it’s cache and PageRank though so it doesn’t look like an all out ban.

    Dan

  12. Ernest on February 20, 2007 6:04 am

    Cheers Dan. Indeed, it looks as though 17to40.co.uk are missing from today’s listings. Update? Exclusion? Let’s wait and see.

    Hands up…who submitted a spam report to The Big G?!

  13. Kevin on February 20, 2007 6:21 pm

    Ernest,

    Is there anymore news on 17to40.co.uk?

    It would be good to hear some details, ideally from Google, as to what has happened to them.

    ‘The Big G’ only have themselves to blame for this situation. They make it almost impossible to achieve a decent SEO placing without resorting to these kind of tactics.

    Without such tactics, SEO and PPC proves to be a real barrier to entry into the car insurance market; so it’s easy to understand why they did what they did.

  14. Ernest on February 20, 2007 7:10 pm

    @Kevin, you’re right to an extent. The market for SEO and PPC has been stretched - the top get further ahead whilst the lower end don’t get a look in to prove themselves.

    However, as far as SEO goes, the top of the market have consolidated into three camps (Tamar, SpannerBoys and A.N.Other). Those with Tamar and SpannerBoys will follow very similar tactics…not wholly ethical as there is a huge amount of grey (and dare I say black) hat activity going on here. As the algorithms catch up or shift emphasis, the whole lot stands to lose out…depending how severe the shift.

    History stands that those who follow the guidelines and ethical practice will have the last laugh.

  15. Henry on February 27, 2007 12:15 pm

    Henry strange to claim tamar do not work with 17to40 because tamar have incoluded detailed success stats recenlty in your sales pitches.

    If you do not work directly you are very very close to people who got it devalued in the search engines.

  16. Ernest on March 8, 2007 10:22 am

    Interesting spark to the debate! Does either ‘Henry’ care to evaluate further on this?

  17. Kevin on March 16, 2007 10:10 am

    Great debate.

    Just wanted to shovel a few more coals onto the fire by bringing up ASDAfinance.com

    Similar to 17to40.co.uk’s rapid entry to the top 5 when this debate started, asdafinance.com has arrived at Google No.2 today for ‘car insurance’.

    Anyone know who’s doing the SEO for ASDA? Their strategy is transparent, although in today’s SEO climate more of a greyhat approach - link buying.

    They’ve amassed 200,000 links to their car-insurance.html page through site-wide link purchases on some decent domains.

    How, exactly, does the Google algorithm not compensate for such wild fluctuations in back-link quantities?

  18. Richard on May 14, 2007 12:18 pm

    I’d love to say that we (Latitude) do the Norwich Union SEO, but alas we do not.

  19. George on May 14, 2007 3:17 pm

    @Richard,
    My apologies for assuming Latitude do the SEO for NU (is it just PPC?). There’s an article here that says it’s Neutralize.
    George

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