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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

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How long does it take to recover from a Google ‘blacklisting’? (GoCompare update)

April 16, 2008

A couple of months ago we highlighted the fate of GoCompare, the insurance comparison site that was ‘blacklisted’ by Google after the search engine discovered irregular linking activity. Just to recap: for the first few weeks of 2008, ‘car insurance’ was sending more traffic to www.gocompare.com than any other search term, including its own brand name. But once the penalty was applied, the site plummeted down the rankings for ‘car insurance’ and other key terms, leaving competitors such as Confused.com and Comparethemarket.com to pick up the pieces.

So how is the recovery going? The chart below illustrates how much search traffic GoCompare receives from ‘car insurance’. The orange line represents its share of traffic from the term since Christmas, while the blue line represents its rank amongst all of the sites receiving traffic from the term over the same period. As you can see, for the first few weeks of the year GoCompare ranked second for ‘car insurance’ (behind Money Supermarket), and at its peak was receiving over 15% of traffic from term (4 weeks ending 25th January 2008).

However, once the site fell down Google’s listings, its rank dropped to a low of 9th for the term ‘car insurance’, receiving less than 2% of traffic from the term for the 4 weeks ending 1st March 2008. Since then it has started the slow climb back up the rankings, receiving 3.75% of traffic for the term for the latest 4 weeks, moving up to 7th place. In other words: 11 weeks since the penalty first took effect, and GoCompare still has a long way to go.

It is interesting to consider what the financial costs of such a ‘blacklisting’ might be. Obviously the biggest cost is the lost business as a result of falling search traffic to GoCompare’s website, but it would have also incurred increased marketing costs in order to aid its recovery. One of these is an increase in paid search activity, as illustrated in the chart below.

The orange line is same as in the first chart, while the pink line represents the proportion GoCompare’s search traffic from the term ‘car insurance’ that came from paid listings. As you can see, when the site was riding high before the ‘blacklisting’, it was well optimized and didn’t rely heavily on paid search for traffic from the term ‘car insurance’; but this situation changed once its organic ranking slipped. GoCompare’s paid search activity for the term shot up and, although this is now declining as the site’s organic ranking recovers, it is still well above the pre-‘blacklisting’ levels.

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In Categories Financial Services | Google | Search

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