Google, of course, is currently by far the most popular search engine. It is therefore of vital importance for any commercial enterprise to rank highly on Google for relevant and popular keyword searches. Historically, some prominent insurance brands have fallen foul of Google's might and sophistication when attempting to obtain a high search rank, notably Moneysupermarket, Gocompare and Kwikfit.
For Google at least, buying links and coverage from prominent sites - for example high profile bloggers with a high Google importance rank - is now treated as 'black hat' - i.e. unacceptable search engine optimisation (SEO) practice which leads to rank-lowering penalties.
'White hat' (legitimate) search engine optimization tactics, for example, providing keyword-rich content that is genuinely useful to visitors, can still be treated as black hat or spam content if key words are over-used. In fact, this very rarely occurs in practice, the more usual problem being that sites have insufficient keywords and more have to be added, producing some cumbersone language with unnecessary repitition of keywords.
One problem for smaller operations such as this site is that unlike, for example, a supermarket chain or any large company, we do not have multiple websites ranked as important by Google that can point at each other and so inflate search ranks. While there is some merit in using an algorithm that favours the larger operators, given that many people will be looking for the more well-established organisations, it is, arguably, acting against one of the key strengths of the internet which is that the small outfit should be able to thrive above the 'large' outfit, based purely on merit rather than size and might.
Interestingly, the new Cuil (pronounced 'Cool') search engine harnasses this exact philosophy in the way it ranks its entries. Unfortunately, it is in its infancy and currently lags way behind Google and other leading search engines in its utility.
So where does that leave you if you are using Google for insurance-related searches? Well, you won't find this website if you enter 'car insurance' into a Google search although we do rank well on other leading search engines. A significant amount of our traffic still comes from Google, however, as it seems to be good at picking up on certain phrases that feature in our content. For the latter reason, Google indexing and retrieval seems to have an edge in terms of identifying exactly what people are looking for and works hard to match your needs. On the down side, as reviewed above, it is weighted towards the bigger players for the more competitive keywords with the effect that services such as this - which in many ways offer more to the end user than our bigger competitors - are squashed flat under multiple large corporate boots.
It has been our impression that Google's algorithm has begun to pay greater attention to content, even where inbound links are less prominent. This is surely a good development, given that a search engine's indexing ought only to be merit-driven.
The SEO landscape could be changing rapidly soon. Watch this space.
