How Does Google Treat The Blacklisted Sites?

The impact on a website of being ‘blacklisted’ by Google has been highlighted recently by the insurance comparison website GoCompare.com, observes Robin Goad. The website experienced this very dilemma after Google picked up on irregular inbound links to its site, which resulted in a steep fall in its rankings.

The present season is on its acme in searches for ‘car insurance,’ in fact the term has increased its “share of searches” by 31% since the week ending December 29, 2007. Before the Google's axe fell on it, the rise in the “share of searches” was a great news for GoCompare, as the comparison site was well established as the top website within Google’s natural / organic listings for the term.

Once it was blacklisted it dropped down the listings sharply, and as of now it is on the seventh page of listings, far below the top 10 rank.

Apparently, during the week that ended on January 26, 2008, GoCompare was over the top for the search term ‘car insurance,' and had already acquired 17.49% of the all search traffic from the term. The search term was also the number one term that sent traffic to the site, and accounted for more traffic even than the term ‘go compare,’ its own brand name. Furthermore, one out of six visits to the site came from the term.

GoCompare's progress chart is shown below:

During the week ending on February 9, 2008, GoCompare got only 2.31% of all search term traffic from the term ‘car insurance,’ which is an astounding 87% decrease from the week ending on January 26, 2008, when it was flying high at the numero uno natural position on Google. And all this happened while searches for ‘car insurance’ remained constant during this period as is apparent.

Today, search engines are perhaps the most important source of traffic to finance price comparison websites, and account for more than a third of their upstream traffic. While it is important to make sure that a website is properly optimized, breaking the rules could land you up in big trouble.

Click here to subscribe to our RSS feed to get a daily digest of news around search engine industry. PageTraffic SEO Blog is updated four times a day and is ranked as one of the best search engine resources blog by Pandia!