Yesterday, Google announced they will be officially getting into selling auto-insurance through google.com/compare/autoinsurance/. Yes, this is a big deal but SEOs took notice of the blog post announcing it.
If you look, you will see three links in the post, the first two are keyword rich anchor text links that are [credit card] and [car insurance] both linking to Google properties. The last link is a [here] link so people can learn more about the service.
Several SEOs called them out on this on Twitter:
IN YOUR FACE SEOS! Google uses exact match anchor text, etc to rank itself for insurance money terms http://t.co/xxw2g02YwV
— john andrews (@johnandrews) March 6, 2015Wow. I'd sure call those unnatural links coming from the Google Adwords blog: http://t.co/21OpTeW7Ji HT @TheRealpmac & @johnandrews
— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) March 6, 2015@Marie_Haynes LOL, Penguin may implode when it come across those. :)
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) March 6, 2015@Marie_Haynes This phrase completely fit here, "Practice, what you preach"!
— Umar Khan (@MUmar_Khan) March 6, 2015Here is a picture of the blog post with the anchor text as it is now:
I wonder if Google will leave it as is or decide to change it in the future.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
Update: Shortly after this story went live, Google removed the keyword rich anchor text from the blog post.
