Those that read my blog regularly will know I’ve long ranted about how Google can be so hard line in some areas and yet let obvious link buying go unpunished. I’ve highlighted quite clearly in a previous post about paid link methods that still work and still in the UK anyway there has been little if any big smack downs for big brands that don’t follow the guidelines.

One of the areas I work in is Car Insurance, notoriously difficult to do well in “ethically” and full of paid link profiles like you wouldn’t believe and a super costly scale. Those that also work in this sector will have noticed that there are always those sites that are seen as “authorities” and very rarely move rankings and then there are those that come from no-where and suddenly take all the glory.

One such site is a company called Hastings Direct – now I’m not saying “these guys buy links” however if you look at a recent track of rankings for the keyword “car insurance” versus 2 stable brands such as confused.com and comparethemarket you’ll notice what it might look like:

The 2 faint lines are those of the other brands and the orange line is that of Hastings Direct, they actually moved to #2 in Google for about a week before moving to mid page 2 today. This increase and decrease “could” be for a number of other SEO reasons but if anyone was to do a quick 2 minute analysis of their backlinks you’d probably make up your mind quickly on this. I also considered this might be due to increased performance by those around this site and in turn push a few down so I did another comparison for “Cheap Car Insurance” versus the same 2 brands:

Again in the chart above you can see they’ve been significantly moved to a much lower position, this is the same for a number of other keywords. This movement  is actually quite common in highly competitive industries such as car, home and travel insurance, websites will move from mid second page into a very high position and eventually get moved back down.

It goes to show to some degree that buying links for the keyword car insurance is not a worthwhile long term solution for SEO as well as holding a great deal of risk for those that do carry it out – Google turns a blind eye many times to big brands that buy links – potentially this is the start of something new?

I watched another Google video on YouTube recently where Matt Cutt’s discusses when Google penalties are lifted. During the video there are certain parts of what he said which really made me think more in depth about how Google deals with the sheer number potential penalties. Matt mentions (0:30) that there are automatic methods of detection and processing, which include content spam and keyword stuffing etc.

Hearing this made me think of one of my affiliate websites I had setup a few months ago and a problem I had encountered. The website has 100% unique content, affiliate products from TradeDoubler and a premium CSS template to make it look a little fancy with minimal effort. Now the website in question is an exact match domain and I was specifically targeting a keyword group with around1-2k monthly visitors, using just unique content and a few directory links I’ve found this method to work extremely well in the past.

The Problem

I’d used this particular premium CSS template 2/3 times before for other very similar products but had customised ever so slightly (i.e. different colurs + logo). The problem however was that although my other affiliate sites ranked in the top 3 continually for the target keywords this particular site was not. In fact it was bouncing in and out from position 4 to position 93 – bit strange..

I’d not bought any links for the site in question so I knew that things were all “white” externally so thought there must be something within the site causing one of these automatic penalties. Looking at the code I noticed 2 H1 tags, one being highlighted below as an image:

The other H1 was just highlighted in a standard way – this was the only element I could think Google would pick up on as potentially “Stuffing” or something similarly nagitive. I proceeded to remove the text in the code and waited, anticipating a return to index in a high position.

As predicted a few days after I’d removed the second H1 tag the site moved from position 90+ into the top 5 . Bear in mind I’d changed absolutely nothing else at this point and just to proove it was the H1 tag causing a problem I added it back, then removed (see second arrow). As well as rankings increasing to a position I thought it should be at the traffic also duplicated the rankings:

Although this is only one site and I’d like to test more it seems quite certain that either having 2 H1 tags triggers an automatic Google penalty or the method of using <h1 id=”logo”><span></span></h1> is not liked by Google.

Some might argue that it’s just common good SEO practice to have only 1 H1 tag but if this test is anything to go by it culd be more costly than you first think!

If anyone else has any more data on this I’d be interested to hear?