• Hitwise Intelligence, Thursday, February 14, 2008 12 PM

GoCompare, a UK-based auto insurance Web site, recently got smacked-down by Google in terms of rankings. As of Jan. 26, GoCompare.com was the No. 1 site when it came to the search term "car insurance." Run the same search now and GoCompare isn't even in the top 10. Robin Goad notes that the site finally shows up in the seventhpage of organic results.

During the week of Jan. 26, GoCompare captured nearly 17.5% of all search traffic for the term "car insurance"--and roughly one out of every six visits to the site originated from that term. Now GoCompare receives just 2.3% of the traffic for the term--an 87% decrease in volume. And the number of searches for "car insurance" have remained relatively the same, meaning GoCompare's competitor's are picking up the slack.

So what caused the smackdown? You guessed it--there was something fishy going on with GoCompare's link-building strategy. Goad says that Google "picked up on irregular inbound links to the site," with one commenter noting that GoCompare sponsored way too many pay-per-blog posts.

Read the whole story at Hitwise Intelligence »