GoCompare gets knocked by Google penalty

Penalties are issued by Google for numerous reasons - link spamming, buying and selling, "black hat SEO" (or "spamdexing"), duplicate content, keyword spamming - they're all violations of Google's terms of service and can result in a pagerank penalty, listing drop, or even complete removal of your listings from the engine's database.

GoCompare found out recently that it also hurts to openly buy blog posts and reviews on other websites. Having held the #1 spot on Google for "car insurance", they dropped down below position 60 after Google issued a penalty on them for, seemingly, sponsored posts. To indicate the severity of the penalty, Hitwise seems to think GoCompare received an 87% drop in search term traffic after being banned for the term "car insurance". Obviously other companies will benefit from such a penalty; while an 87% drop in traffic from the term wasn't enough for the comparison site to comprehend, Hitwise also states in the same blog post that Compare.com, one of the comparison site competitors, found that traffic from the same search term increased by 77%.

What Google are doing is proving a point. It's in the best interests of website owners to think before they buy themselves into the top spots. In GoCompare's case, it might have been better for them to request a guest spot, or contributed articles to websites.