Google Changes Its Car Insurance Links After SEO Experts Complain

Last week, we reported on the launch of the Google Compare for Auto Insurance tool, which delivers sponsored listings from insurers with rate quote information. Although initially launched only in California, it will roll out to more states soon with additional features including ratings and reviews.

Now, Search Engine Land’s Barry Schwartz explains that Google has quickly changed its car insurance links after complaints from SEO experts. He explains that in Google’s announcement, the company used what SEOs would call keyword rich anchor text to link to both the new auto insurance comparison portal and the old credit card comparison portal. Although only “large-scale article marketing” keyword rich anchor text is considered a “link scheme” by Google, Schwartz explains that some SEOs felt that the company’s use of these keyword rich anchor text links was “unnatural” and was a way to manipulate their own organic search algorithms.

Although Google did not comment on its use of those keyword rich anchor text links, the company quickly removed them after Schwartz posted a story on the Search Engine Roundtable, along with several other SEOs who called the company out on Twitter about the “unnatural links”.

SearchEngineLand.com provided the following before and after screen shots to show the change:

Before screen shot with use of anchor text such as “credit card” and “car insurance”:

After screen shot with those keywords removed:

Interestingly, in the past, Google has violated their own guidelines and have ended up penalizing themselves in the search results.

The first time this occurred was due to cloaking involving its AdWords help pages in 2005. In that case, someone at Google had hidden content in a way that was meant to help those using Google’s own internal search tools. However, due to the fact that those changes were seen by Google’s main search engine, it meant that they were in violation of the company’s guidelines.

Another example happened in 2009, when Google Japan admitted to buying links to help promote a Google widget. Once this news emerged, Google’s search spam team reduced the PageRank score for Google Japan from PR9 to PR5.

The most recent example was in 2012, when Google found itself buying links as part of a campaign to promote its Chrome browser. These links were obtained as part of a video campaign involving two different promotion companies. Although Google explained that the links were more accidental than intentionally sought, it still marked a violation that required the Google page for Chrome to be penalized, and it was subsequently knocked out of the top rankings for searches on “Google Chrome” for two months.

In this latest situation with its car insurance announcement, Schwartz explains that what the company did was not in direct violation of their guidelines and therefore does not warrant penalization. However, as illustrated above, Google did make the decision to remove the keyword specific links to avoid any confusion and controversy in the SEO industry.