Google blacklist recovery - long time no see for GoCompare

Last week I received an email from Robin Goad at Hitwise, updating me on the car insurance aggregator website GoCompare.com I wrote about here. GoCompare tried to cheat the search engines by buying links on other websites, a "black-hat" method of search engine optimisation. Unfortunately for them, Google picked up on this and gave them a ranking penalty, dropping them over 60 positions for the search term "car insurance", and even blacklisting them for their own brand name!

Robin talks about the recovery process for GoCompare and graphs the paid and organic traffic comparisons before and after the penalty was imposed; not surprisingly GoCompare catered for their loss in organic search traffic by increasing their PPC (pay per click) campaign bids - something which will seriously impact their marketing budget.

Some people commented on Robin's post, suggesting they took 6 months to recover from similar penalties, which certainly suggests GoCompare have a long drive ahead of them!

If you have a website and need to improve your chance of ranking higher on the search engines, don't incur penalties - contact our SEO specialists and see what we can do for you.