Easycar – Pushed by Indian Blogs?

By
Shaun
Published: August 10, 2009Posted in: Bad SEOTags:

OK today I am back from holiday and I thought that we may of had some rationalisation in the serps with regards to the effect of blog spam initiated by Indian bloggers and deployed by UK SEO agencies on behalf of their clients.

Sadly I find that my weeks absence has seen no change so I though I might dig around a little and see who is deploying this with a vengeance to push generic search positions.

I decided to look at car hire – so I did the search for car hire in Google and found some interesting results, the one that caught my eye was Easycar.com so I decided to dig. The main reason for this is that they came from the lower echelons of search and straight into a top three position for the term car hire and this aroused my curiosity.

Here are the results for Car Hire –

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BACKLINK ANALYSIS

It is the backlink analysis that I find very revealing and this is for a number of reasons, firstly there are many blog posts that are carrying links to Easycar.com from blog spammers. Many of these bloggers are clearly advertising blogging for money which to my mind is that same as the paid link services that Google has been hammering away at.

http://duniasoer.blogspot.com is one fine example of the type of blog being deployed in this fashion as is http://indurics.blogspot.com/2009/06/car-hire.html in addition there are foreign language blogs such as http://oricadiary.blogspot.com/2009/06/car-hire-en-france.html which are also being used for the same purpose.

Of course there are a large number of these facilities that are effectively nothing more than paid link farms that are currently having  a major effect on search positions in UK Google serps. I was under the impression that Google would not tolerate this type of approach – the paid linking appraoch and yet here we have major high value generic search positions influenced in this way.

In addition many of these bloggers are networked together and post comments to each other, this will if done correctly add new content to pages that are archived and maybe keep the link more regularly indexed, they also spam anchor text links into the comments but these are mostly no followed so that leaves me a little puzzled as to why bother with the link.

UK SEO AGENCIES

Of course the UK agencies that commission this activity are responsible also for its sudden explosion, I get fifty offers a week at the moment from ‘overseas’ agencies offering me links from this type of facility but of course at a price.

Of course before the free enterprise brigade get on their high horses I fully endorse good work expertise that is well done and that can be harnessed into good business practice but a closer look at the posts will show you that this is just a link fest bandwagon that is rolling out of control.

Here is one of the posts that carries a link to Easycar from  a blog that is advertising how to make money from blogging. Just look at the English used and the spammy theme, also see the anchor text used which is highlighted in red boxes, then try and tell me that this is good practice and acceptable and that it is not spam deployed by a leading UK SEO agency.

DAMMING POST – EROSION OF BRAND??

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TEMPTATION

Of course because the temptation is there then agencies will short cut the process but when that also brings results then agencies will use it as part of their strategy and at corporate level it is amazing that they get away with it from a branding perspective.

My experience is that when an advertising campaign is commissioned and then published offline it will of come under huge scrutiny at every step so that the brand is protected and its integrity is consistent, how then can Easycar.com condone this approach to its online advertising or the deployment of its brand in this way, is it because they are unaware or perhaps the success of shooting into a top 3 position in natural search results (yes its only just happened) is justification enough??

That said I have seen their blog posts alongside ‘mens health’ and gambling blog posts and if I dig hard enough I bet it gets worse…

If you look at the comments posted under this blog post you will see more evidence of spam

http://duniasoer.blogspot.com/2009/03/cheap-car-hire-in-barcelona.html#comments

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TOO MUCH WORK FOR NOW BUT….

Easycar.com

There are other aspects that also seem at odds with my experience of Google that are associated with the inbound links to Easycar.com but I will save that for another post.

I will add to this more but after being away from my desk for a week I have much to catch up on.

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