We’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.
Capital One
Credit Made Clearer
lovemoney
Relationship with Your Money
CashQuestions
Personal Finance Problem Solver
Life Cover
Insurance Made Easy
{ 28 comments… read them below or add one }
There you go Rex, George has answered your call – knock yourself out!
I have to say, I think the loans/mortgages/credit card areas of finance are far far worse than general insurance, in terms of link buying and the spamminess of it.
I don’t know how most of those boys get away with it – if you compare the link profiles of Insurance v’s finance sites it’s pretty clear for all to see what I’m getting at – DP network, TLA etc etc etc.
George; I thank You!
cheers Ernie; well there we have it.
No big surprises there.
The majority of SEO will do something* against Google TOS.
buying links is the clearly the main one.
So, we all* buy links…. so how can WE possibly knock Go Compare, kwikFit, MoneySupermarket?
Gentlemen, its hypocritical.
Those people who complain about other people’s positions on the serps are just NOT as good at SEO as those who rank well.
Clive..you just underlined a great example.
People in top positions buy links. fact.
Either get on it or lose out.
But bitching is just futile (though admittedly amusing)
Hammering your point home a litte Rex!!!
Interesting though, speaking to many people in the market and across other sectors, they say they’re doing everything they can on-page including news syndication, fresh rich phrase rich content and so on. They then say they’re left with no choice but to buy links.
You then look at their site and it’s complete rubbish. To be honest with you, I don’t know of one site in the insurance sector which actually has a varied, well structured, content rich, frequently updated, key phrase and URL rich website.
Buying links is just easier! Farm it out to an agency and you’re away – otherwise you’ve got to get the marketing department out of the pub to check the copy for tone and brand value (always brings an SEO conflict).
Does anyone think that’s a far statement? If so, does that mean that the true Google TOS route hasn’t actually been tried by anyone with any real authority?
Ernest
I think you are correct about the conflict with brand values (and compliance) v’s seo.
But, if we’re talking top end search terms, on page factors make very little difference these days, it’s all about the links…
Also, we talk about content, news feeds etc, but what does the punter really want to know? Price, how much, what’s it gonna cost me, people aren’t gonna read through pages of twaddle.
Also, how does that stack up with “design your pages/sites for your customers not search engines” philosophy which get’s preached all the time? Creating pages of content because you think that’s what search engines want is actually the latter.
Finally, I don’t agree that buying links is easier in all cases, it isn’t that black and white, all the sites in the top 20 or 30 have paid for links, but you can’t class them all as the same.
@Clive
On the ease of which you can buy links – what I mean is that it’s something you can easily outsource without another company needing to know much about you. Outsourcing the other aspects, content and so on actually requires a lot more work. You’re absolutely right that the agency (or internal team) has their work cut out to persuade people to take their links, pay for news content – whatever the technique.
As for content, reading twaddle etc. just take one look at the levels of interaction and popularity of MoneySavingExpert amongst it’s 2-3m+ customers. There are ways – even with insurance! – to build enough rich and relevant content. It’s a confusing market place full of complex products with plenty to explain for anyone from the price focused to the highly involved insurance geek.
Admitedly, the huge majority of people aren’t interested in reading much of it. But all of this topic relevant content, capturing wider search terms, perhaps capturing certain demographics or customer (young, old, female, particular risks etc) all linking into your focal products – that’s where you’ll get the strength and serve customers (assuming the content is informative – not just word stuffed).
You’re right that on-page content seems to have less of an impact. It used to be a 60-off/40-on split but with the strength of links these days, it could be a bit worse now. Still, when everyone is buying links (often from similar sources – chinese cooking blogs and the like), the point of differentiation “sort of” comes back around to the on-page stuff again. Not sure I’ve convinced myself with that point but you can see the logic.
Another long post, late on a Friday evening – Rex is going to book me into rehab at this rate
You must be having doubles Ernie
I wish I was Rex!
Plenty of chop and change on [car insurance] at the moment. Seems like Google is updating the rankings much more regularly than it used to.
Also, I’m seeing Virgin Money and Asda performing well. Both are a few places higher than their usually static but respectable positions.
Hi guys,
Been reading through the last few posts and comments and some useful stuff there. I have a quick question and would appreciate your expert opinions please on what you would do in this situation.
Say you had a site that was 1 year old and was currently ranking on page 2 for the usual competitive insurance terms such as “car insurance” etc. A site which is ranking in the top 3 for the same terms has come up for sale. The top 3 site is well established and over 6 years old:
a) would you buy the site? or
b) would you use the money instead to promote your own site and get it into the top 3?
cheers.
@Peter -if you were on page two you could always just buy links for your competitors and report them
I’d buy such a site if it were for sale, but why would anyone with such a position sell? Unless maybe the offer was very very good. But then, SERP positions (as weve seen recently) can be very transient things too.
Ultimately, I think I’d have to go with investing in my site and emulating and surpassing the actions of my competitors
The whole subject is a no-brainer to anyone who claims to be in the SEO industry
1) You ‘buy’ links purposely to boost your ranking for specific search terms: buying links
2) You employ someone to ‘link build’, you are paying them money to accumulate links: buying links
3) You buy/build a reciprocal link directory to amass as many links as possible: buying links
4) You create a forum with to create a ‘buzz’ on a specific subject with the intention of promoting a product or service. You spend time building a reputation: buying links
5) You pay someone to write articles for ‘quality content’ which will receive ‘natural inbound links’: buying links
As you can see, any amount of time where you are consciously trying to improve your website from an SEO POV, you are buying links, because you know you want links.
The bit that irks me the most is the idea that you create so called “useful content” by creating 100 pages of information that is probably good enough and available on some other website. This is totally wasteful and indeed, more pointless than buying links.
Amen.
@Steve M
Of course SEO has a cost. Otherwise, you’d be getting something for nothing. But there’s a big difference in principle about directly paying for a link on someone else’s site and providing content, tools and crucitally a service that people want to recommend and link to naturally.
As we’ve mentioned many times before, there’s little difference to what appears on the surface – the rankings – but the direct link buying is an easier and usually more effective route for most. It makes complete commercial sense for many companies. How long that lasts for, whether there will be more penalities as we’ve seen or whether Google can/will/want to do anything about it – only time will tell. In the meantime, it’s open season!
Why not buy? Links are like any other commodity, tradeable and have a definitive value.
Clive you mention loans/credit cards/mortgages are worse, of course they are. Look at one of the biggest ranking loans and mortgages limited companies and you will see a current 50 point penalty.
Now what do you think caused that for them? Possibly buying their way in?
Come on guys, i was epxecting more of a response than that for my post above, lol!
@Peter
Top 3 ranking site up for grabs, I’d go for it – which one is it moneysuper,confused or tesco?
Either way I’d grab it!!
@Smith
Your comment – “Why not buy? Links are like any other commodity, tradeable and have a definitive value.”
Because then it’s simply a game of budgets and not relevance to what the customer is looking for. Remember, Google’s aim is to arrange the chaos of the internet into some sort of order.
@Peter
You can really get some value from the older, established, higher ranking domain. However, it’s not as simple as that. What’s their ranking based on? Link buying? What’s the running cost to maintain that position? Would you plan to continue with the two brands or try to pass the weight of the bought domain into your existing? What are they doing that you’re not (on and off page)?
Each of these questions and many more will need answering to work out the best decision and method of transfer.
@Clive
I thought we agreed I’d get first refusal on buying the confused domain? If I buy you a pint we’ll call it even yeah? Hang on a minute – would that then mean I have to honour the £1m pound prize money?!
@Ernest
That’s why they’re selling it, want to get out of that prize mess!!
Re link buying being a case of biggest budgets, I’m not sure I agree with that one, isn’t the DP network free? That’s gotta be one of the spammiest corner cutting tricks and doesn’t cost a penny.
Also, buying links via people like TLA doesn’t cost the earth.
Lastly, I thought everyone in Insurance read this blog, obviously not as there are still sites that think paid blog posts are their way to the top – amazing…
Thanks for the feedback guys. Looks like i have quite a few things to ponder on.
The thought of having two sites in the top 10 would be a dream. I would be looking to promote them seperately to give us a better chance of staying up there.
The original reason i considered buying was that it could take quite a long time to get our current site into the top 10. Buying the top 3 site would also give us an advantage over our competitors.
@Clive
“Lastly, I thought everyone in Insurance read this blog, obviously not as there are still sites that think paid blog posts are their way to the top – amazing”
It is mate.
Go Compare are in 4th.
Are you?
GC in 4th hey, how long before they plumb the depths of page 5 once more.
Or have they learnt their lesson and will be good little SEO’s from now on?
I think everyone agrees that the big boys all seem to buy links in some capacity, just take a look at money-expert who seem to have shot up recently! You’re not telling me they acquired their 9 million backlinks using white hat techniques – and look how that’s paid off for them?
Granted, there may be a penalty from Google for spammy link profiles as we’ve seen recently from GoCompare, Confused etc… but then after a few months Google will forgive and forget!! So what’s to stop everyone from going completely black-hat if all they have to fear is a few months ban from Google, and then it’s back up to your old spot.
Also, whilst I’m on the subject – Best Deal Insurance weren’t doing anything with their car insurance page – so I doubt it’ll bother them that they’ve suffered a penalty there.
@Peter
We were recently faced with a decision to buy out a competing site that ranked well in the car insurance industry. However, ultimately we decided against it. The owner let it slip how much his link-building budget was costing him per month and at the time the site had begun to fluctuate on the SERP’s.
We figured that we could better spend that money on our own SEO since we weren’t that far away from the site we were going to buy.
On the flip-side, if you’re ranking on page 10 or below and you’ve got a large budget, then buy it. It’ll take you 6 months to get a decent ranking position and maybe cost you as much the buyout to get there.
@David B – Money Expert probably haven’t bought any links directly, but websites to host the Digital Point link network (which is free to sign up to) – it sticks out like a sore thumb and yet Google do nothing about it, perhaps because of the others involved (thisismoney, dailymail etc)
My main beef with the tactics used in ranking in insurance isn’t with buying links per say – I believe Google have no right to dictate whether or not a website can advertise on another – its more a question of style.
I’d rather be the SEO who can get top rankings for finding relevant neighbourhood links and able to increase the natural linkability of a website via good content, than an SEO who just signs up to a network and throws a lot of money at the problem. Half of that money goes to waste since they appear on irrelevant websites, and so you have to make up for a lack of style with sheer volume of links. GoCompare, BestDealInsurance etc just spammed thousands of very unrelated websites and yet still got good results, but its like taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut – its possible to get similar results by just doing good research and targeting quality over quantity links (and yes, I do speak from experience not ranking envy)
If anything the paid link debate shows the Google algo isn’t as good as all those Google PhDs would have you believe, being as it relies on paid link reports from human beings (With all the politics involved in that) rather than the Google algo being able to sort it out itself.
I would say paid text links then are still a very viable option, especially in those industries (such as insurance) where there are high payoffs for being top ranked, but I wouldn’t rely on it on the long term since Google will eventually manage to automate it (I wonder if they are compiling all those paid link reports to feed into their machine and identify all paid links automatically one day)
@An insurance seo
Agree with you, although other people in this thread can’t distinguish between lazy/corner cutting tactics and what SEO is all about…
Moneyexpert tried the DP network for insurance last year and google knocked them back on those terms, so will be interesting to see how long it lasts this time, think it lasted a couple of weeks last time. Prior to them, Fool.co.uk used it, again didn’t last more than a few months, so unlike other industries google does have a history of not allowing DP using sites to rank for Insurance terms for too long. We will see.
Thanks for that information David. From what i can gather, you’re saying if we are on page 2 with our 1 year old site then we shouldn’t bother buying the top 3 site?
wouldn’t it be better to have two sites in the top 10 giving us 2 chances to grab a customer?
Insurance SEO Guy, I couldnt have put it better myself.
The Algo is built on links.
We all agree that quality has always worked over quantity for long term stability; but links ARE the currency nonetheless.
Its a difficult decsion for many of us to make:
Head down the dark path of buying links, get cought and potentially disappear for a very long time.
OR
Stay in the light and bait links through eternal quality content and hope one day you rank.
We all think our sites offer something to the customer and to be fair most in the arena I work in (insurance) do provide the customer what they are looking for.
SO, we continue to fight to get to the first page and then onto the summit….
@Peter
It depends on the cost-benefits – check out Google trends – if the site you’re going to buy performs in the top 3 terms for something like “cheap car insurance” then I know you’ll get something like 250 to 80 valid quotes per day. And if they rank for more than just one term then you could be looking at more quotes per day and therefore more revenue.
We also had thought that if we came up twice then we’d get more customers, but then we’d end up maintaining two link campaigns and could possibly spread ourselves too thin and end-up underperforming.
On the other hand look at Endsleigh, they’ve got a few well ranking sites for car insurance ranking for different keywords (i.e. 17to40) to try and bag those extra few customers.
So ultimately it depends on how big your budget is – if you can afford to spend £150k upwards per year on SEO then go for it.
@insurance seo guy & rex
100% with you, create good content – link bait – and hope it’s genuinely good enough for people to link to.
The only trouble is, it’s very difficult to create an original “link baiting” scheme – for example you could say that Confused’s £1M giveaway is a “link baiting”/”publicity” scheme – but is it actually working?
Not only that, but where insurance is concerned, if one company thinks of a good link-baiting idea then it would be easy for competitors to copy that same idea. And really, how else can you dress up “insurance” – it’s pretty dull to the average consumer.
@David B – responding to all your points would be repetitive of stuff we’ve gone over before. Just wanted to pick you up on the what’s interesting/link bait point.
My personal opinion is that I’ve found the insurance and personal finance sector in general to be one of the least creative I’ve come across. OK, the product isn’t that interesting at all but as insurance insiders (rather than just SEOers), we all know a fair amount of information which the customer doesn’t that could open their eyes some what.
Plenty of ways to make that into something a little bit creative and getting some inbound links coming in (perhaps not on the confused million pounds offer scale though). I think the most creative people have got is to put a graph together to show how prices are rising or falling. [yawn]
I have a question and if I could get an honest answer that would be tits! lol
I have quite a few domains, all finance related. I just recently put new blogs on each so they are new sites (less than a month old) but all finance related (loans/remo/mortgage/credit cards/debt/insurance). Also, they are spread over about 20 different IPs (mostly diff. class c’s, etc.). I’ll be uploading content to them on a daily basis (god willing).
Admittedly they won’t be award-winning in-depth sites but I will be selling link space on each. I realise since they are new selling 1 link may not fare much cash but would asking for say £100/month to have a link on 25 different domains for example be justified? Too little? Too much? Why?
So, in the example above, that would be 25 finance domains with each site having x-amount of pages (e.g. 30 pages each now x 25 domains = 750 links) and increasing over time.
Btw, each domain is at least 18 months old with some about 3 1/2 years old but the sites on them are new.
Thanks for any advice. Thought I’d ask since this is about buying links