Update: Do you care about Spam in Search Results – Tell Google about Endsleigh

A previous post about Search engine spammers and cheaters created a fair amount of noise in the comments! It even attracted employees from major SEO companies and key market players.

• AJ from Spannerworks
• Antony Mayfield from Spannerworks
• Henry from Tamar
• Kevin from GoCompare

It also saw corrections in the analysis – the SEO industry seems to be quite protective of their conquests! However, two questions remain:

1. Who is creating all these Endsleigh doorway pages satellite sites?
2. How are Endsleigh getting away with cheating Google?

Let’s answer those questions now.

Endsleigh’s 28,000 or so backlinks come from many different domains to harness link equity and appear in the top 10 for [car insurance]. However, they also seem to use satellite sites that all point to Endsleigh. Here are a few:

• 17to40
• SonarDirect
• YourHomeInsurance
• ReduceMyQuote
• Student’s Insurance
• YourHomeInsurance
• YourMotorInsurance
• HouseInsuranceQuoteUK
• And the list goes on… I’ll post some more if requested but there are hundreds.

Henry from Tamar suggests that they have no control over these sites and are not managing them. So who is creating them?

Further analysis reveals a slightly tangled web. This http://reducemyquote.tamarstage.dcmanaged.com/ sure looks like Tamar to me! Henry, what’s the real story?

Finally, why does Google allow this. Their guidelines specifically state:

• Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content
• Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.

This looks like a contravention to me. Kevin also comments whether there is any sign that Google will take action. I highly doubt it, but if a few of us submit a quick spam report, things should get interesting.

UPDATE 20th Feb: Success! 17to40.co.uk have been removed from the search results – but for how long?