What happens if your site gets ‘blacklisted’ by Google?

What is the impact on a website of being ‘blacklisted’ by Google? Recently the insurance comparison website GoCompare.com faced precisely this dilemma after the search engine picked up on irregular inbound links to its site, causing it to plummet down the rankings.

We are currently seeing a seasonal peak in searches for ‘car insurance’, and the term has increased its share of searches by 31% since the week ending 29th December. Before it fell out with Google, this was good news for GoCompare as the comparison site had established itself as the top website within Google’s natural / organic listings for the term. However, since being ‘blacklisted’ it has dropped down the listings and, at the time of writing, is currently on the seventh page of listings – i.e. well outside of the top 10.

Looking at the data, during the week ending 26th January 2008 GoCompare was the number one site receiving traffic from the term ‘car insurance’, capturing 17.49% of the all search traffic from the term. In fact, the term was so important to GoCompare that it was the number one term sending traffic to the site, accounting for more traffic even than the branded term ‘go compare’. During the week ending 26 January 2008, one in six visits to the site came from the term.

The chart below shows traffic to GoCompare from the term ‘car insurance’ on the left axis, compared to overall searches for the term on the right axis. The area highlighted in red illustrates the impact on GoCompare after the blacklisting had taken effect (during week ending 2nd February).

GoCompare received only 2.31% of all search term traffic from the term ‘car insurance’ during the week ending 9th February, which is an 87% decrease from week ending 26th Jan when it held the #1 natural position on Google. However, as we see from this chart, searches for ‘car insurance’ remained constant during this period.

So what has the impact been on GoCompare’s competitors in the insurance price comparison sector? Confused.com and Comparethemarket.com have shown the largest increase in traffic from searches for ‘car insurance’ over the last two weeks. Traffic from the term to Confused.com has increased by 77% since the 26th January, while traffic to Comparethemarket.com has tripled over the same period.

Search engines are the most important source of traffic to finance price comparison websites, accounting for over a third of their upstream traffic. Ensuring that a website is well-optimised for search engines is vital in such a competitive industry, but this example illustrates the fine balance that needs to be achieved between effective SEO and breaking the ‘rules’.