15 February 2008
Getting a top organic ranking in Google can drive a huge amount of customers to a website, resulting in large profits.
However, breaking the rules can result in you being removed from Google’s listing all together. Recently, GoCompare.com, a well known large car insurance comparison site, was allegedly penalised, meaning they were moved them from number 1 to page 7 for the search term "car insurance".
Google has made no comment so far but most search experts agree that the site appears to have been given a penalty for buying links, a tactic against the Google guidelines. Normally a site being penalised in Google isn't major news (it happens every day) but in this incidence Hitwise has done some research into the effects of the penalty and offered some interesting statistics.
Apparently before the sudden drop in rankings, 1 in 6 visitors to GoCompare.com found the site by searching for "car insurance". Afterwards the traffic dropped 87%.
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