GoCompare No Longer Ranking for their Brand Name. Again.

This morning I saw that Patrick Altoft on his search engine optimisation site had mentioned that GoCompare had been penalised again.

Patrick had previously mentioned a penalty after he looked at paid links in the car insurance vertical.

The latest article points to an email published on Red Cardinal showing how GoCompare requested some of their links.

At first I thought that if the email printed on RedCardinal is what GoCompare have been dropped for, then I’ll eat my snow white fedora. That email was absolutely fine in my eyes, they write content and get a link. No different at all to a bulk email with the HTML code already formated with a paragraph with a juicy anchor.

The difference is though, once you’ve been bad in the past then the slightest infraction gets you sent to the naughty step.

As Patrick pointed out on Twitter:

GoCompare is going to suffer much more this year than last year – Google allows trademark bidding now so leakage will be huge.

Previously, GoCompare could bid effectively for their brand name within AdWords. Now they are competing with affiliates and competitors who may bid on the term “Go Compare” driving the price GoCompare must bid ever higher.

GoCompare currently rank in Google.co.uk

Insurance	71
Home insurance	55
Car insurance	59
Home content insurance	67
Breakdown cover	69
Home contents insurance	71
Business insurance	71
Life insurance	Not in top 100
Travel insurance	Not in top 100
Health insurance	Not in top 100

If GoCompare can’t get re included in the search results and start to rank competitively for their key terms this could be disastrous for the the company.