Maybe just an apology was required?

To be honest, it’s a perfectly fine method of link building.

I can see the problem with this method in the way they were going about it. Mass emailing a webmasters with a template is just bad for business.

As of just before 10AM GMT this morning, GoCompare has begun to re-appear at #1 in the Google SERPs for its brand name. It appears to be ranking for some other terms as well. This isn’t totally consistent as yet because it takes a while to replicate around data centres so you may see it jump in and out of the results. Given that the drop in rankings for this site originally sparked this debate, I thought you would appreciate the update.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&num=100&q=go+compare&btnG=Search&meta=cr%3DcountryUK|countryGB

Best regards – Simon
Simon Snelling BSc(Hons) MBCS CEng CITP
Partner and Co-Founder
Content Now LLP

Far from saying that you shouldn’t have ‘named and shamed’ I am simply using your decision to do so as a defence against your comment that my reflections on you personally are ‘weird’. They’re not, they are perfectly reasonable.

TBH I do feel that what you have published is incorrect *if* GoCompare have been penalised. The reason that it is incorrect is that it presented a very one-sided level of risk that you laid firmly at the door of the small publisher sites, rather than with GoCompare also. As a no doubt well respected commentator, this bias will also be shared by a proportion of your readership because they trust what you say.

You yourself say that while you may not be able to point at sites that have been penalised due to this tactic it doesn’t negate the risk involved. But you have already pointed at a site – GoCompare – in a subsequent post. Which does then change the whole original argument that the risk is all with the publisher.

It’s just food for thought. Personally I think the TOS is vague, deliberately so IMO.

Any comments I’ve made about GoCompare are based on the email I received. I did approach them to ensure that the email actually originated from them, and had a short email exchange with their marketing manager before this blew up. The name in the email can easily be found in Insider’s View and I have to say he’s pretty much summed up my thoughts on this. I’m still happy to stand by what I’ve published, but obviously if it turns out that anything I’ve said is incorrect I’ll very happily apologise to anyone that was unfairly affected by my commentary.

Thanks again & rgds
Richard

You admit that link building is tricky and that you’ve worked in some fairly competitive niches that become more and more difficult as you ascend the competitive ladder. You also say you are ‘pretty white hat’, I picked up on the use of the word ‘pretty’ as it wouldn’t be required if you didn’t dabble in some grey areas! You may not agree, but I feel that is an important point. Far from being a case of shooting the messenger, it was more a case of saying ‘are you really in a position to expose another site for alleged wrong doings when none of us know what methods you yourself use to acquire links?’. It’s not unreasonable to flag it IMO(!).

You say that it is weird that I defended my argument with reflections on you personally. How is this different than the argument you made that reflected on Gocompare? In particular you ‘name and shame’ the person that sent the email whilst also saying they are disingenuous.

And your post was flawed in that it made the following statements:
“Site owners take all the risk while GoCompare take all the benefit.”
“GoCaompare learnt from previous bans that it’s better to pass the risk to someone else…”
“GoCompare’s risk is negligible, while the risks to publishers are high.”

You yourself think that GoCompare have been penalised. With hindsight if you had to write the original post again I imagine (and I may be wrong) that you would probably balance out the level of risk a little more than you did originally. I’d honestly be really interested to hear of any publishers that have taken content from GoCompare and who have been penalised. I expect you would too.

Reading my original post I can see nothing that isn’t factual. You and I might disagree over interpretation of Google’s guidelines, but that doesn’t make my interpretation factually incorrect.

I apologise if you think I’m calling your conviction on this into question. That’s not the case, regardless of what side your on. I’m actually asking why you made a point of saying:

Only pretty white hat? So not 100% white hat then or the word ‘pretty’ wouldn’t be required. I question the credibility of the whole post in light of this.

What difference does the colour of my hat make to this argument? That’s generally a classic play of PR people wishing to deflect attention. Again, I’m not suggesting that’s your intent, but it seemed weird to me to defend your argument with reflections on me personally.

I’ll happily hear what additional flaws, in addition to those you’ve made above, you think are in the post. I’m a reasonable guy, and will honestly hold my hand up when I get it wrong. Can you also point me to any information you know of that calls what I’ve written into doubt pls? I’m genuinely interested to know if there is info out there that can help me understand any errors I’ve made here.

Rgds and thanks
Richard

I am not affiliated with GoCompare…sigh…I don’t actually care what fate awaits them in terms of rankings but I do think that when a site loses its brand terms the credibility of the search engine suffers too. What I actually care about is the quality of the information put out there and whether an argument can stand up to scrutiny. You’ll see that I am now embroiled in various discussions about Google’s TOS and what qualifies as a breach and what doesn’t. This doesn’t mean that I am affiliated with GoCompare, and it’s rather cheap to suggest that I wouldn’t have the same convictions were I not.

Unlike the guys over at Insiders View, I am sorry that you can’t admit that there were flaws in your original post. I am not saying for one moment that you shouldn’t have posted it at all, or that it’s not added value or generated a healthy debate – as you can see I am all for that! – what I have said is that I have issues with some of the points you’ve made and regardless of what you’ve come back to me with I stand by this.

@King – thanks for posting your comments here. I’ll try to respond from my perspective to each point you make.

1. Google states fairly clearly that participating in link schemes in against their guidelines. I agree that this is extremely vague, and likely purposely so so that Google can apply that guideline as it sees fit. In my opinion the email was disingenuous, and bordering on misleading. Obviously just my opinion, but then again most things in the SEO world are just opinions.

2. Define sale:

A sale is the pinnacle activity involved in selling products or services in return for money or other compensation. It is an act of completion of a commercial activity.

No matter how you try and cut this, and you’re entitled to your own opinion of course, the intent is clear IMO – this tactic offers content for links, and is therefore a sale. It’s a fine line I’ll admit, but I think what pushes it over that line is the offer made to unsuspecting site owners that this is in some way beneficial to them. The content may have some benefit, but saying that linking out to one of GoCompare’s pages has an SEO benefit to their own site is not ethical IMO. Again, only my opinion.

3. Perhaps that’s why Google decided to hammer GoCompare? To send out a message? Of course I’ll admit that some people are making arguments that perhaps the site refresh is the cause of their poor ranking. All I can say is that after looking at hundreds, if not thousands, of sites with Google issues I’ve never seen one authoritative (and uniquely unambiguous) brand rank so poorly for their own brand in Google.

4. Classic ploy of shoot the messenger. Do you mind me asking if you have any affiliation with GoCompare? I’ve noticed you’ve been both vocal and defensive in your various responses online to this story.

5. I have to disagree with you. Taken to an extreme your argument could be used to justify scams etc. The email is sent from the “web manager” of a well known brand – i.e. someone who is likely to be authoritative on web-related issues – and therefore less savvy recipients may be more likely to believe what they’re told. Again this is only my opinion, but you cannot defend all activity with caveat emptor.

I appreciate you dropping by to post your own opinions on this, but I’d just like to say again that the reason I published this email was to get the message out that this tactic, in my opinion, carries risk. I’m not against GoCompare per-se, and have no hidden agendas to harm either them or Content Now. My only concern is that smaller site owners do not fall prey to any associated damage without being fully aware of the risk (I perceive) inherent in this tactic.

I did notice you seem to have forgotten to repost the final line from your comment on Kieron’s very eloquent response:

I deal in FACTS. These are my opinions.

Best rgds, and thanks for re-commenting here
Richard

I have issues with the original blog post, mainly:

1. “Alex fails to mention that such content on your site goes against Google’s TOS and risks a penalty for the publishing site”

What a ridiculous statement! Why on earth would “Alex” mention this? Has Google said it breaks their TOS? No of course they haven’t, so it is all down to individual interpretation of the “rules”. Perish the thought that this may vary from one person to the next!

2. In light of point 1, it seems very strange to then complain “Worse still – site owners aren’t even offered payment for selling links to GoCompare.”

Make your mind up, either you want them to meet the TOS or you don’t! And the actual sentence doesn’t even make sense – “site owners aren’t even offered payment for selling links”. That.is.because.they.aren’t.selling.links. Dear oh dear.

3. “Site owners take all the risk while GoCompare take all the benefit.”

Really? Not if all the speculation of a penalty is to be believed!

4. “I’m generally pretty white-hat when it comes to SEO,”

Only pretty white hat? So not 100% white hat then or the word ‘pretty’ wouldn’t be required. I question the credibility of the whole post in light of this.

5. “I have a problem with GoCompare.com’s email. They are preying on site owners who wont realise the risks of adding this “unique content”.”

These people aren’t complete morons, if they have a website and are interested in getting some unique content – at no monetary expense to them – then they are perfectly capable of getting online and doing a bit of research to find out if there are any potential pitfalls. They have a choice.

There is an element of risk for all of us whatever we take for free or buy.

This is a very enlightening post and even though it’s a tactic I don’t personally do or plan to do, I don’t think it’s a shady tactic that should be penalized. I guess someday all links will have to be discredited because the line between merit and paid based links will to blurry to see.

Since we have been named in a number of posts in various places, we have just responded on Kieron’s blog at:-

http://www.here.org.uk/2009/04/content-for-links.html

Have a great weekend.

Thanks and kind regards – Simon & Kieron

Kieron Donoghue & Simon Snelling
Partners and Co-Founders, Content Now LLP

GoCompare is potentially manipulating the results if they are very specific with the link text, which is of course against Google’s rules, but that is not the publishers problem as long as they think the link is fair and justified based on quality.

So its no surprise Google made an example of GoCompare, but if they were to punish the people who published the articles just cause they liked the articles that would be completely unfair. They’ve done nothing wrong.

What GoCompare did wasn’t really that bad, they didn’t pay anyone, and left it up to publishers to publish what they want. Sure it helped there Search Engine rankings and they knew it. But creating a quality piece of linkbait and submitting to digg helps your rankings too. Is that wrong? Maybe it is.

Point being we don’t know because Google is not clear and then publishes high quality and useful sites because their guidelines were not clear.

I agree with what you’ve mentioned above – this tactic is a major threat to Google, and that’s why I imagine they’ve sent out such a strong signal.

Hi Ciaran

This wasn’t about me wanting to get at GoCompare. This was about trying to protect unsuspecting site owners who might fall foul of a Google penalty for publishing this content. I spend a fair amount of time over on the Google Webmaster Support Group and see a lot of penalised sites come in there. The tactics used by GoCompare show little or no regard for the site owners they are preying on IMO. That’s why I pushed this out. FWIW I see a whole lot of dodgy stuff going on and don’t go shouting about it. I believe GoCompare do SEO in-house, so I dont know that this will affect any agency relationship (apart from the company that offers this hosted content service). Thankfully I’m not in any need of new clients, so there was no self interest in me publishing these details.

Thanks to both for dropping by.
Rgds
Richard

Hopefully not. If GL (whose dodgy network was banned not so long ago) were to improve the quality of what they’re doing for Vodafone, I’d tell Vodafone to stay with them. They won’t get much better

It’s in all our interests that Google loses it’s total monopoly.
This linking tactic being used is untraceable IMO if done smart.

If GL were to improve the quality of their hosted articles, V would be crazy to change agency. What would be the point? GL are only doing what all the other top tier of SEO’s are doing – particularly in competitive spaces. (We’ve no affiliation with V or GL btw)

This is a clear warning shot to put the fear of God into websites who don’t want to risk their rankings by doing *anything* that Google *might” decide not to like at some point.

Yet clients still want to rank highly….I can imagine a typical conversation with a small-medium sized co in the near future:
“How much are you quoting us to do SEO via 100% linkbaiting? €200K? Are you nuts?”

Do you think most SEO clients are aware that until 2 years ago, Google’s terms said:
“You may not use Google to increase traffic to your Website for commercial reasons”
(And that the terms were changed so as to not terrify Googles’ own customers?)

Google’s motto is “do no evil?” Maybe it should instead be “do our business model no evil”…..

Read what US court-appointed independent expert Dr Alex Tuzhilin said about Google’s Adwords platform in 2006 when he was sent in to assess their anti-click fraud measures. Essentially it was “intent is impossible to measure so there is a fundamental flaw with the PPC model”.
Funnily enough, the lads in Mountain View disagreed….

We’re not talking about PPC here of course.

We’re talking about a very real threat to the fundamental concept underlying Google’s market position and the billions at stake due to their current ability to limit manipulation of their search results.

GoCompare were an easy target for Google to test with & were clearly on the “special watch” list – particularly as they were banned previously.

At a guess, Google are TERRIFIED by this tactic because of it’s simplicity & their inability to determine the “intent” of the article writer.

Unlike with the multiple footer text link ads on sites for which MoneySupermarket got hit pre-IPO (& which they’re still doing)

I’m quite sure Google have discussed setting up a special “report hosted article links” form like they have for paid links as the best way to monitor it.
Of course competitors would then rat each other out with fake reports which is probably why they haven’t ……

You said on the EI list that you knew a few sites hit for doing this.
I’m not saying you’re wrong but could you have been wrong? Might it have been something else?

How can Google possibly work out the *intent* of a high quality article writer on an established, relevent content-rich website?
They can’t. (To do these hosted article links well is expensive – eg £50 each – but done well, they work and are 100% untraceable)

I think it might have been at the Vegas Pubcon 2 years ago where one of the well-known speakers said that they had a client’s incoming links analysed in depth by Matt Cutts with all his fancy tools and no red flags were raised – because the article links were done so well.

Cost-effective SEO is about artificially making a site *perceived* to be extremely popular by Google for it’s target keywords.

What all SEO’s do is artificial – unless you’re spending many hundreds of thousands on link-baiting in the competitive sectors like finance/insurance.

No ifs or buts. Clients don’t say they want this. But that’s what they’re asking for when they ask an SEO to be 1st.

I challenge anyone to list 5 simple, logic-based rules Google might use to work out if a hosted article containing a deep link is “genuine” or not?
(I’m well aware that if Google can possibly learn something, it’s best to assume they will)

I think they’re absolutely terrified of this tactic now made famous by GoCompare because not being able to work out or even guess the *intent* of the linking site, directly attacks the very heart of their ranking algorithm.

If huge international companies like Vodafone are also doing this (not particularly well via Greenlight), all Google can do is sow fear.

And don’t they know it.

John Ring

I accepted one piece of “unique content” for a client, ripped the links out, changed a few things, Easy, cheap content for their site!

It’s not exactly ethical, preying on smaller local sites with more to lose. Maybe the main reason for the drop.

Second ban too. How many strikes before you’re out completely? It’d be in G’s interest to keep them out as long as possible. The longer they’re out, the more they’ll spend on Adwords!

I’m sure manual reviews of all the sites in this industry will raise alarm bells but the exposure this brings will send our a message.

Good call on this post btw…

I’ll agree there’s a fine line here, but maybe the issue here was intent along with the fact that GoCompare dresses this up as something innocent when it wasn’t.

I’d say a link to the originating site is one thing, but a deep link to a 3rd party page surrounded by copy that has been written around that deep page is perhaps the issue.

If I was to hazard a guess though the problem was the way the email was deceptive about the purpose and consequences of publishing this content.

Rgds, and thanks for dropping by
Richard

Good afternoon,
I work for Moneysupermarket.com and I have recently checked out your site *******.com and thought it was really good.
The reason I am writing is to see whether you would be interested in including a small text link to our car insurance site. The purpose of this site is to provide the customer with a service which compares over 50 car insurance companies quickly and easily online.
In return for this link I could write a relevant article on a subject of your choice and submit this to a number of reputable online article websites. Within this article would be some links to your website which in the past I have done and has helped improve a website’s ranking and number of visitors.
The reason I mention this option is because unfortunately we cannot offer a reciprocal link due to us not having a links page currently available.
If you are interested, please do not hesitate to contact me on the email address mentioned below.
Thanks for your time and have a great day!

Gill Critchley

Marketing Department

and

Hi,
I work for moneysupermarket.com and recently found your blog the ********.co.uk and thought it was really good and informative, I was wondering whether you would consider adding a link to our car insurance comparison page?
If there are any procedures or costs involved I’d welcome the opportunity to discuss this further so feel free to email me at this address.

Best Regards,
Andy Adams BSc (Hons)

moneysupermarket.com Financial Group
Moneysupermarket House
St. Davids Park
Ewloe
Flintshire
CH5 3UZ

Cmon Google ban this lot!

There are a few references to an ‘SEO company’, last I knew GC had taken their seo in-house. Is this not the case?

I dont feel “content for links” is spammy or unethical if its done right.

The site gets good unique content thats its readers will enjoy and the link inserted should be a natural extension of the article.

Thats the approach i take when building links this way

@David – I’d agree that there’s far worse, but my issue with it was that they were giving site owners the impression that this could be beneficial to them, whereas the reality is that there was more risk than benefit to the publisher.

@Wiep – what’s the intent? As I say above, the fact that they aren’t paying doesn’t make much difference in my book.

@All – I’d agree that this isn’t exactly hardcore in terms of what goes on in that niche, but my concern is only for the small publishers who could be on the end on penalties for carrying this content. Would a human reviewer looking at these articles think “oh maybe they published this for free”? I doubt it.

You could argue that syndicated content should carry a link to the source, but I think we all know GoCompare were carrying deeplinks to pages they ranted to rank. Again, it all boils down to intent.

Thanks for commenting,
Rgds
Richard

Then how exactly would this be a paid link?

there are worse operators out there who demand a link from websites…

GoCompare ban

GoCompare aren’t ranking for their brand today in Google – http://www.redcardinal.ie/search-engine-optimisation/22-04-2009/gocompare-penalised-by-google/

@David – my name is Richard Hearne. I tend to keep a low profile, so it’s no wonder you couldn’t find my name.

Rgds, and thanks for dropping by.

And to the blogger (sorry, I couldn’t find your name), but I loved the way you told it as it is. Kudos. Looking forward to another post!

cheers,
Nick

Rgds
Richard