The Rise and Fall of Citadel-Insurance.co.uk
In a well-documented haze of online search engine manipulation it became apparent that the competitive nature of the ‘car insurance' organic search results was simply too much for one company to ignore after it came to light that one site had mysteriously appeared on the first page of Google search results in an alarming period of time.
Thanks to Screaming Frog being alert to their own data tracking, the company were able to reveal that www.Citadel-Insurance.co.uk had seen a huge improvement in their search engine visibility for one of the most competitive online markets in the world and on taking a look at their backlink profile, it soon became apparent that something surrounding the site was not as it should have been.
Obviously working in the search engine field ourselves, we were interested in taking a look at what the site had managed to achieve in such a short period of time, so we took the chance to be able to take a look at what they were doing in order to warrant such a quick appearance organically.
One thing that we should maybe point out is that we do not believe that this domain is associated with Citadel Insurance in any way as the information that we are able to obtain seems to show that is not the case, as you can see from the two whois records:
With that cleared up, we decided that the reason for the unwarranted appearance within the search engine results can only have been down to the vast number of links that the site had seen forced into it as per the comments made by Screaming Frog on social networking site Twitter, so we took a look at what they had been up to.
Using Ahrefs.com as the backlink analysis tool, we could immediately see that the spike in the number of links began in the middle of June, with the number of total links coming to a peak on June 22nd, at which point Ahrefs reported that they had seen 205,513 links obtained from 6,763 referring domains.
This number has since started to decline and on trying to how the links were placed into the linking sites, we can see that the links are being removed already.
At the point of being found out, the site's backlink profile was boasting a huge number of referring domains with a variety of anchor text being used, although the highest percentage of those being ‘car insurance' which made up 52% of the total number of anchor text being used on these backlinks.
Here is what the top 10 anchor texts were within the profile, with percentages that they made up of the whole backlink profile as well as the number of referring domains that the links came from:
Going back to the whois information that we pulled, there is a tell-tale sign that the owner of the domain operates in a completely different market, one that we already know is an industry that is prone to things such as these being done in order to manipulate the search engine results, payday loans.
Thanks to the notification of the site and the antics that it displayed, Google took action against the site and reduced their rankings drastically, as can be seen in the rankings that are tracked by SearchMetrics.com:
It would have been interesting to see how long the site (which is now no longer rendering any form of website) would have remained within the rankings should this have not been pointed out to Google but we would have presumed that they would have seen the site during their installation of their very own car insurance quotes box within the results…
But that’s a whole new post for another day!
Thanks to Malcolm Slade for his thoughts and contribution too!
10 Comments
Alan - https://plus.google.com/u/0/117284429491199188414
Its funny how we all seem to be doing Google’s job for them. It a shame that the millions of spammy sites and duplicates such as indeed.co.uk
Alex Graves
Yeah know what you mean Alan, although guess it is all hands to the deck when adding in a whole new revenue stream into their already densely populated ad filled results…
Malcolm Slade - http://www.malcolmslade.co.uk
Pleasure working with you Alex. Dave, he’s a keeper
Alex Graves
Always willing to work with anyone on something like this Malcolm, if you have anything else we should break to the world just give me a shout and we’ll take on the blackhat world one analysis at a time!
Roger
I don’t endorse spammy sites or technique in any way shape or form. What this is site has done is repeated and rinsed throughout the blackhat community.
What do find ironical and double standard is using the word “search engine manipulation” to label these sites, while your agency and any agency who job description is SEO or link building are doing exactly the same. Search manipulation but building links.
Contrary to common perception, there are no white or backhat methods. If you ask for/buy/request/build a link, you are manipulating search engines. Period.
Alex Graves
Roger, I do see where you are coming from in a specific point of view but there is more to SEO than building links in order to manipulate rankings, instead the focus is meant to be on the ability to be able to make a website easier for a search engine to be able to determine relevance in order to use the content and other on page alterations in order to make its own decision as to what it should show to its users.
Your thoughts surrounding blackhat, greyhat and whitehat SEO seem to be a little closed in relation to the techniques that these labels comprise of as from what I can see from your comment surrounding your understanding of SEO is that everyone heads out and asks for links, regardless as to whether they are paid or incentive based.
Surely you are not saying that every SEO company or individual is the same in their approach to trying to make a website better?
Where is the wrong doing in creating whitepapers or research content that could be picked up, rewritten or shared by visitors that have seen it?
You might put your name on it, but I won't.
Interesting post and one I’ve been following as I have been competing with this Mamdouh chap.
One thing that I think is awfully risky though… why bring attention to what he’s doing? We all know this was the guy that was crushing everyone else in Payday Loans for months. He clearly has the resources and skills to generate masses of links overnight.
Writing a post like this just encourages Google to crack down on him. Sure the guy is a spammer and its frustrating… but I wouldn’t want to be the one trying to out him.
What are you going to do when he sticks the knife into one of your clients in retaliation for this post / Daves tweets? Its going to be hard to explain to a client that they’ve been penalised because you wanted a few more thousand eyeballs on an seo post on your own site.
David Sewell - http://www.seoeditors.com
Looks like the technique that was used to push citadel has been used again on a new site!
This site: charming-ferret co uk
Is now showing near the bottom of page one for ‘car insurance’ search.
Jon - http://new-boiler-cost.co.uk
Was this all achieved just by using comment spam or where they doing other things?
john campbell - http://www.aukseo.co.uk
Hi Alex
Good little write up, did you pick up on http://www.charming-ferret.co.uk/ which was also from the same guy. It started to rank on Monday for “car insurance”, but this time it only lasted two days. Ironically it knocked the real meerkat off the first page.
From what I’ve seen he’ll keep doing it, however Google seems to be getting quicker at picking the site up and removing it, but that might be due to the manual spam reports coming in !