After GoCompare suffered a Google penalty (which was recently lifted) one might expect the car insurance industry in the UK to pay attention and stop buying links.
This doesn’t yet seem to be the case with Kwik Fit apparently suffering a minus 50 penalty after aggressively trying to rank their kwik-fit-insurance.com domain. Another site called BestDealInsurance have also been hit while there are no doubt a few more sites with lower profiles that have also been hit.
Is this a sign of things to come?
I know that there are still loads of SEO companies out there who buy thousands of backlinks for their clients in one go. Good to see that the big G has finally caught up!
If there was more publicity around the penalised websites then there would be more awareness and people would not assume they can get away with buying links.
Ha, they have a LONG WAY to go. Google cannot figure out link buying, its become a joke. They penalise one or two that they find, hoping it sends a warning. It used to catch peoples attention… now it doesn’t even get heard.
Car insurance especially…..thats a big money term.
Googlebot will soon be sophisticated enough to be able to find these sites and penalise them automatically, it’s just a matter of time. Even if they can’t do it they will change the algorithm so that something else is more impottant than links. It’s just similar to when SE’s first came on the scene and everyone packed their site with keywords…
I totally agree that it’s only a matter of time before The Google Machine catches up with everyone doing this. It’s a balance. There are those who want to toss up a quicky site to drive users there, only to discard it after Google blacklists it. For these people, buying links shouldn’t be a problem, since they’re gonna ditch the site anyway. However, for those who are trying to build out online brands, they definitely shouldn’t buy links. Even if it’s squeaky clean now, it’s only a matter of time before Goog catches on. ;)
Wishful thinking. Google is not what it used to be. Its not even about those putting up quick fix sites. What about established sites with 10,000 links already. No one notices the extra 500 in the mix, but they all push the keyterm that they want. Who’s to say what was bought and what was just a site that likes what the other site is doing. No algorithm can catch that.
Human behavior will always outpace the Google machine.