This was the online marketing buzz of the week. Gocompare has been blacklisted from the search engine result pages…. again? Yes, again! It has happened last year already in January 2008. They were at the top for “car insurance”, which is a crazy competitive keyword, but Google finally found out the huuuge paid links campaigns they were operating. That’s why they were blacklisted from search engine result page.
It has happened again this week, apparently the 22nd April. They are not blacklisted though as they are still showing on SERPs. However, they are so low in rankings that the impact is as close as if they were blacklisted. It seems that the penalty is a “minus 60 positions” as they are hitting the position 57 at the moment for their own brand name. I would not like to be the SEO agency OR the one dealing the SEO in house. 
So why are they so heavily penalised again? That’s what the buzz is about as NOBODY really knows what is going on. Have they been paying for links still? Have they tried sneaky, black hat stuffs? I’m not entirely sure.
James at Coast Digital had an original opinion about that buzz : isn’t it a lINKBAITING OPERATION? I think this is a really interesting idea, as the whole online marketing community has been talking/tweeting/blogging about that since yesterday. This has actually produced great inbound links from authoritative blogs to gocompare.com. If this is the case, the person who came up with the is an incredible genius creative master of the world, and should be given an award just for this operation.
I’m personnaly suspicious and I’m convinced this is a penalty from Google, and not a calculated operation. Indeed, Gocompare.com is having a massive TV campaigns at the moment, and they are not showing for their brand term on organic results (they are still on Adwords though). If someone see the commercial today, go to Google and type in “gocompare”, look what they find today!
GoCompare is associated with the word PENALTY or even CONSPIRACY. I really doubt this will have an amazing impact on the brand. I actually think this is a disaster, considering the money they spend on TV. The share of people who would google the brand name instead of typing the Url in the browser will really have to click fast on the Adword at the top for not seeing the world Penalty attributed to GoCompare.com.
Anyway, this has been an interesting buzz, and I’m hoping that Matt Cutts will communicate soon on this.