We’ve seen from previous insurance spammers that underhand tactics do work. Well, we have done some more digging and found another potential spammer in the marketplace. ChooseInsurance – they have jumped in to the top ten on GoogleUK for [car insurance] and exist in the top 30 on Google for [car insurance].
What’s wrong with that? Well, Google is failing to promote authority sites over those that use underhand, spamming techniques. Worse still, do you think that SEOs who compete in the asbestos and mesothelioma market belong here? Let’s look at the details of who these spammers are and where they live.
ChooseInsurance.co.uk has an astonishing 8,037 backlinks. However, of the top 1000 unique domains, we can see that a significant proportion comes from just two sites:
| Unique Domains | BackLink Count | Cumulative % |
|---|---|---|
| simplekindoflife.com | 608 | 61 |
| 3daymom.com | 111 | 72 |
| zunka.com | 72 | 79 |
| 3daymom.com | 43 | 84 |
| buymeblog.com | 42 | 88 |
| geekyspeaky.com | 31 | 91 |
| Other | 90 | 100 |
| Total | 997 |
As you can see from above, 88% of all backlinks come from just five domains. That is surely not an authority site. In most cases, it looks like spam can be spotted fairly easily (see chart to the left).
Who are ChooseInsurance.co.uk?
Answering this question is not as easy as it may seem. The site offers very little to the customer and has very few outbound links. In the last week, a new ‘company’ has been added, QuoteZone, which is accessible via an affiliate link. There are a few Adsense links but that’s it – perhaps the site owners don’t know how well they’re doing and aren’t monetising this site. There is also a rather nasty implementation of a newsfeed which is implanted via an iframe from a DayPop RSSFeed – ugh!
The Sponsors and Links pages are empty, but there is a helpful Link in the footer which details the SEO Company. After some tracking, it looks like the man behind the SEO is Christopher Angus who
- has written many articles in the SEO field
- apparently costs £20/spam story shown on this article about ebay scammers
- runs SEO for seocompanyuk, MobilityDirect, BookPrinting, Spherical Images, Stammering Stuttering
- has email addresses [Removed], [Removed]
- can be contacted on [Removed]
His mate is obviously Anthony Gregory who
- also likes to write about asbestos
To add to the band of merry men, another man behind the SEO appears to be:
John Inder (according to an insurance link post) who could be a litte more subtle when asking for reciprocal links:
Hello Myself john
i need some insurance related sites with pr+3 if u have any insurance related links then pls reply me.
The Man Behind ChooseInsurance.co.uk
According to the SEO company’s clients page, the man behind ChooseInsurance is Paul Hornblower. As to whether this is his real name, who knows? I think it would be more interesting to find out whether ChooseInsurance actually have a business model!
ChooseInsurance are search engine spammers!
Well, actually, I don’t think they are. It’s the search engines themselves who are creating this impossible market. There will always be people using less than ethical methods to compete. ChooseInsurance seem like a small operation who are trying to move in to this space. They have obviously taken some bad advice on using these slightly grey-hat SEOs but you can’t blame them for that.
So Paul Hornblower, if you do exist, what’s the real story?
Capital One
Credit Made Clearer
lovemoney
Relationship with Your Money
CashQuestions
Personal Finance Problem Solver
Life Cover
Insurance Made Easy
{ 32 comments… read them below or add one }
I raised this point in one of your previous articles. When you’re SEo’ing a consumer site on an ethical basis, it extremely frustrating to see sites like this having such a prominent placing on the major terms. Surely Google should be taking more action against such basic affiliate sites.
Also, there appears to be another Endsleigh satellite site high in the rankings. http://www.yourmotorinsurance.co.uk have raised to 4th on the term motor insurance.
what about asda? top for the term car insurance they are doing the same thing as chooseinsurance
Well, you know where the spam reporting is…go fishing!
Anyone got any clue why Google are not picking it up themselves though? In the case of Asda, you could argue that they want to deliver brands to the Google customers. However, Chooseinsurance are an absolute nobody.
Perhaps one of many signs that The Big G is struggling under the huge volume of the web?
You guys have got it so wrong! I laughed and laughed when reading your blog. Thanks!
Just to put the record straight, Choose Insurance is NOT doing well on Google because of so called “spamming techniques” if you experts actually looked a bit more carefully into the link profiling. Yes, most of the links come from 5 blogs. However, the owner of the blogs gave Choose Insurance a link on each blog’s homepage. Thus, everytime a page gets written the link gets repeated. It hardly constitutes spam by having a few links on a few blogs dont you think??? As you are experts you will also know that having many links from the same IP address only counts as one link..Choose Insurance doesn’t even need the links on the blogs, even if the blogs did not exist Choose Insurance would still be performing well.
If you want to have a proper discussion why don’t you contact Chris Angus using the details you published.
Paul,
I am delighted that you have responded as we do actually want to find out the truth behind chooseinsurance. We also want to give you the opportunity to express your side of the story.
Would you and/or Chris be interested in answering some questions or would you like to explain your SEO strategy from the chooseinsurance perspective?
Regards
George
P.S. I have removed the contact details of Chris Angus as the publication of his details, whilst publically available, was a little voyeuristic.
I’d like to ask a few questions first:
1) Why should we share our knowledge with a bunch of guys who have taken the time to try and damage our income and website?
2) Kevin, I’ve noticed your website has had some SEO applied to it, you have in excess of 5000 backlinks, I don’t understand why you are shouting? Or is it because you just haven’t achieved what you wanted?
Mr Hornblower Esq.
Firstly, I must be pedantic and pick up on your comment: “the owner of the blogs gave Choose Insurance a link on each blog’s homepage”. A link on someone’s homepage equals one. A link on someone’s template equals many.
With regards to your two questions…
1) That’s what we’re here for. We’re here to point out the white, grey and black hat methods in the insurance industry – beit SEO, products, data, GUIs or whatever we happen to be interested in that week.
We don’t have an agenda other than doing things correctly. Of course, that also means pointing out where people are not sticking to the guidelines and still succeeding to see if we can learn from it.
2) That brings me onto your second point about Kevin. If you look at his posts/questions/website, you ‘could’ make the assumption that he has the wrong approach to SEO. Hompages are vital but there are many own goals on his. He’s also working with an infant domain whilst constantly looking at guys such as yourselves to get a quick win. Naturally, he’ll be thinking to himself, “why don’t I do what they’re doing?” Neither George nor myself have endorsed his SEO work.
=============
We’re here to invoke debate. Our approach is fairly clear – we believe in the long term and we’re looking to do things correctly. Rightly or wrongly, we have faith in that approach. Recent developments help us to believe this is the right approach.
Obviously, you push boundaries and look for ways to get one up on everyone else. But we all have a different line drawn in the sand.
…and if you want to really get your teeth into a project, phone up Michael Page and ask them about the GoCompare jobs they’re advertising. You could find yourself sitting next to Kevin tomorrow …you would be in Wales though
David, to address your post on 28th March…you’ll now notice that Asda are no longer top for car insurance. They’re currently on page 4.
Since your post, Choose Insurance have also risen…but then so did Asda before they fell. My prediction, bestdealinsurance will be next. They’re currently making inroads into ‘car insurance’ to match their quick success on other popular insurance terms.
Check it out George…my comments are almost as long as your post! Serves you right for posting about Marketing topics. Get back in your dark room!!
I was watching this post hoping the ChooseInsurance guy would come back. Sounds like it’s gone all quiet…makes healthy debate a bit more difficult!
ChooseInsurance now look to have dropped down to 6 or 7 for the term [car insurance]. Still hanging in there.
As mentioned in the uswitch thread, moneysupermarket seem to have been hit across a lot of phrases, 40’s for “car insurance”.
I’ve only noticed the new comments today. Ernest / George, is there any way you can highlight the new comments that have been posted since your last visit to your site?
Paul, I’m actually one of your biggest fans. It never ceases to amaze me how well the affiliate market has grasped SEO and this is shown with affiliate sites occupying high positions for some of the most lucrative search terms. Achieving position 4 on car insurance, as you have done, is an awesome feat of SEO. I am not skilled in SEO and am unable to critique on how this positioning has been achieved, but I am very impressed nonetheless.
With regard to our site, we are an up and coming company that is working extremely hard to get our comparison service out to consumers wishing to find car insurance. We are confident that we have a service that is of real value to anyone searching for car insurance and therefore believe, based on Google’s desire to match searches to appropriate products, that we should in theory have a high position for searches such as ‘car insurance’. Of course, if it were this simple, there wouldn’t be a search engine optimisation industry!
We are in a very precarious position. For business reasons, we need to quickly improve our Google positioning, but are always mindful that we must achieve this in an ethical manner. There’s no point getting to page 1 for a week if you then get banned and can’t get above page 40 for 6 months! On the links front, we are working very hard with our PR agency to get natural links for our website. We have started to acquire some paid links, but this is being done on a very small scale for obvious reasons. Beyond that there is little that we can do and are in a position of wait and see!
Also, as Ernest points out, we are recruiting for an SEO expert. Are you interested? Only kidding but, seriously what would your strategy be if you were in our position?
@Kevin
I’ve just come across your last post here. I think today’s activities with MoneySupermarket show that it is dangerous to be following the paid text link route. Have you seen much of an impact on your listings? Do you think you’re giving it a fair trial if you’re only doing it on a small scale? Woudl you be able to tell the difference between your PR link building and your unnatural paid for link building with this approach?
Sounds like you need results quite quickly. That’s rarely conducive to a healthy and successful SEO campaign.
I don’t mean to rock the boat, and only want to know from a learning point of view, but how does everyone feel about a link like the ones at http://www.watchingamerica.com.
The sponsored links are way down the bottom and none of the companies relate to the content. However having a link here gives quite a few back links in Yahoo! Site Explorer.
@Creased
Just when I thought you were vaguely sane!! Why should the links on this site be any different to any of the others? Seriously, interested to know what you think.
The context isn’t there, the geo-location is wrong for a UK site and it’s an obvious paid for link sitting directly underneather the advertising disclaimer! The Yahoo Site Explorer links will be populous because the link sits on the template, not a particular page. How much credit do you think you’d get for that?
@Creased, Ernest
Was it just me that spotted the “compare car insurance” link on the RHS to gocompare?
@George
I saw The Bike Insurer but no GoDespair
RE: Watching America. I noticed this a few weeks back when checking our links and wondered ‘why on earth is this linking to us?’. I haven’t raised this with our SEO Company as we are just about to change them.
As you may have guessed from my posts, I am no SEO expert but do enjoy the subject and its impact on my business. I use this site to learn as much about SEO as possible and to identify potential pitfalls which could influence Gocompare.com’s SEO presence (which as yet is not particularly good).
Please let me know if you think there are other links that could damage our SEO or if you have any useful advice that we can use.
Kevin
I see elephant.co.uk & diamond.co.uk have gotten into the “buy run of site links from US sites” rythem, like confused.
Spannerworks obviously feel that’s a good strategy, very risky at the moment if you ask me with all the noises Matt Cutts is making and the examples of MS, asda etc.
Will be interesting to see if there is a retraction of such tactics..
@Ernest
I am sane, lol. I just wanted to gain people’s thoughts on a textbook paid link.
@Kevin
You mentioned changing SEO company and also that you had no idea that there was a paid for link to your domain. I’d ask them to clearly explain their actions. It sounds dodgey if you honestly don’t know why that link is there.
Why are you changing SEO company? Haven’t delivered results in the short term? Spotted some dodgey practices like this? Costing too much? Not what you hoped for?
It seems very difficult to hire an SEO company without knowing the finer details of the SEO world. I’ve seen many ‘convincing’ SEO companies pitch for business and fall flat on their arse the minute you pose a vaguely challenging or ethical question.
We are changing SEO companies as I was not happy with the service levels we were getting.
In terms of links, we had agreed to purchase links to relevent sites, albeit at a low level, but did not know about the american site until doing a link search via Yahoo.
Who would you recommend then as a good SEO company?
@Kevin
It’s never good news when you find out that you’ve been sold a poor service. I’ve heard many stories of people throwing £20k here or £30k there per month and getting very little in return.
In my opinion, SEO companies who quote that sort of figure are taking advantage of the uneducated many (usually a traditional marketing manager).
Unfortunately, because we both work within the realms of insurance, recommending you a good SEO company would be shooting myself in the foot …got to protect the day job!!
Would it be of use if we put a post together for everyone to discuss how they go about finding a good SEO company and what tricks they use to trip them up under examination?
@Kevin
My god, I’ve just seen GoCompare appearing at no.2 in Google for the paid listings in Google. How much of a small fortune is that costing you??!!
Hi – Im the Director of Seopa Ltd, the company who own quotezone.co.uk. I have noticed this post and though i should shed a little light on the subject.
Quotezone.co.uk appeared on choose insurance for a short time and had a good review (deservedly too as we are a good insurance comparison site!).
We contacted the owners and negotiated a deal to put a branded version of the quotezone engine on the website shortly after seeing good quality traffic coming from the choose insurance site.
The post suggests that choose insurance was built up by spam tactics, however, all I could see them doing was building links and blogging – which is pretty much the same SEO practice that all companies use these days (just check backlinks in the top 10 for car insurance to see what I mean).
Co-branding of sites is also common practice these days in the insurance industry with many household names doing the same thing and having a number of brands.
Obviously, its in our interests to get more traffic, and while it benefits us, we also feel that it benefits the consumer to see an aggregator engine ranking highly so that they can compare quotes. We do make it clear on the quote engine that it is powered by quotezone so the consumer should not be confused by this.
I agree with Greg, Choose Insurance simply sets an example of what everyone should be trying to do, and obviously Google like it so there’e you’re answer.
It strikes me that there is a lot of bitchiness on this site from those who are simply envious of the dollars that roll from top spot for [car insurance] on Google in today’s UK insurance market.
@Kevin “RE: Watching America. I noticed this a few weeks back when checking our links and wondered ‘why on earth is this linking to us?’. I haven’t raised this with our SEO Company as we are just about to change them.”
Funny how Kevin was so shocked in April 07, yet 6 months later the links are still up and account for half of GoCompare’s backlinks in Yahoo! They obviously were deemed to work by the new SEO company?
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