Sep

2

How will The New Google Browser affect our industry?

Filed Under Marketing Insurance | 5 Comments

Google Chrome Logo

Google Chrome Logo

If you’re not up to speed, Google is launching its version of a web browser dubbed Google Chrome. It will compete head to head with Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Safari and Opera (plus all the others!). It’s based on the WebKit rendering engine. Who cares about this? Well… Click to continue

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Aug

29

TescoCompare launches utility comparison - gas, electricity compare

Filed Under Insurance Aggregators | 7 Comments

TescoCompare has launched its utility comparison engine. Or should I say Xelector have won the white label deal!

So, This is where we stand:

TescoCompare Products

Product Who Built It?
Home Insurance In House
Car Insurance In House
Bike Insurance The Bike Insurer
Mortgages London and Country Mortgages
Utilities Xelector
(Data) Defaqto

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Aug

14

Bullhorn up for Sale - Bullhorn.co.uk the comparison site selling

Filed Under Insurance Aggregators | 6 Comments

Insurance comparison site Bullhorn.co.uk is up for sale. Possibly. We’re not sure whether it’s a marketing exercise but they’ve got a press release out. Matt Johnson from Bullhorn gave us an exclusive by revealing the details in a comment on one of our posts. Matt, we’re waiting for your take on the story - answer your emails!

The story goes that they don’t have the cash to continue marketing. That hasn’t stoppped them bidding on Adwords though(!).

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Jul

31

How Not to Improve Search Engines

Filed Under SEO | 7 Comments

Cuil (presumably pronounced “Cool”) has attempted to take on Google as the new search engine:

Cuil’s goal is to solve the two great problems of search: how to index the whole Internet—not just part of it—and how to analyze and sort out its pages so you get relevant results.

I’m not quite sure it’s there yet with this rather jolly search (see screenshot) where the first result sees Gocompare stealing the limelight with their logo. But, the link goes to Q4.com!

Cuil Search Results

Cuil Search Results

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Jul

31

Spam the search engines from Within with Google Knol

Filed Under SEO | Leave a Comment

knol spam

Google’s release of Knol is already getting some good coverage. As expected, it’s not long before people start to spam the pages.
Examples:
Excellent Anchor Text Usage:
http://knol.google.com/k/ian-wright/life-insurance/3kqeus4rqskvq/3?locale=en#
Promotions of text links: http://knol.google.com/k/ojal-suthar/top-5-jobs-that-need-life-insurance/bocfh5g6tzdk/2#

White-Hats: Think of a way to produce some authority content. The usual rules apply, it’s a war(!). We try to even the playing fields with information.
Black-Hats: Spam away! The duplicate content issues I believe are still not fixed so you could get a Knol page indexed above your competitors with exactly the same content. Then just switch the links over to your site.

P.S. The page is set to no-follow but that doesn’t stop other benefits including those above.

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Jul

16

Beat your Competitors with Yahoo Search Bug

Filed Under SEO | 6 Comments

A new Yahoo Directory bug shows sites hosted or ‘associated with’ yours. What you can use this for:

Try it out:

http://search.yahoo.com/search/dir?ei=UTF-8&p=gocompare

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Jun

27

dot insurance - go.compare, money.supermarket, conf.used

Filed Under Miscellaneous, SEO | 5 Comments

The internet world is changing… ICANN, which manages top level domain names amongst other things has approved brand name web addresses. What does this mean? It means you could have admiral.insurance or go.compare as a web address.

Now for the geeky bit…
This will excite “domainers” who buy and sell domains for a living as they can get in quick and set up an auction or hold on to killer domains for a massive sell out like business.com ($7.5million).

It will also excite the spammers and those that pray on typos as this opens up an new avenue of phishing for them (think about a wildcard on a *.co.u.k)

Check out more information at the BBC or Yahoo

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Jun

23

Anyone seen any insiders around here?!

Filed Under Miscellaneous | 18 Comments

It has been far too long since our last post - funny how a little thing called work tends to get in the way of everything else! And it hasn’t escaped our attention that the SEO posts on here tend to get many more comments than anything else. It seems as though we’ve attracted a fairly strong SEO crowd one way or another.

We’re interested to see who’s still about (roll call with comments please) and see if there is any interest to develop the blog further than the repetitive SEO chat. Of course we won’t abandon the SEO side of things but variety is the spice of life after all …even if we do work in the uninspiring insurance arena!!

It might also be a good time for the many lurkers to make themselves known and see if they want to steer the topics in a particular direction.

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Jun

4

Tescocompare Home Insurance Launches at Tescocompare.com

Filed Under Insurance Aggregators | 12 Comments

Tescocompare.com the RBS owned comparison site has launched its home insurance comparison service. We’ve managed to get access to their private beta but it will be available to the public by the time you read this. Tesco Compare are clearly on a domination march across the financial services world with comparison products soon to launch for mortgages and utilities.

With such a good brand, they’re sure to do well… watch this space.

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May

30

Insurance Merchant Search from Google

Filed Under Marketing Insurance, PPC, SEO | 7 Comments

Google is set to launch its Merchant Search application. Whilst they are trialling this for secured loans, it will definitely get some attention if they release this to the wider population. Financial services like loans, credit cards and insurance are highly competitive. This will make some people very scared indeed.

Compare Secured Loans

Compare Lenders

http://www.google.co.uk/help/merchantsearchbeta/faq.html

http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/help/merchantsearchbeta/review.html 

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