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Bullhorn.co.uk - Confessions Of A Link Buyer

In a quite unprecedented move a UK insurance comparison site has confessed to buying huge quantities of back links to improve their search engine rankings.

Where usually we see these sites put up a stoney wall of silence about their SEO activities, a prominent member of comparison site Bullhorn.co.uk has openly admitted to the site conducting a black hat link building campaign.

In a recent blog comment Head of Technology at Bullhorn.co.uk, under the name David B, disclosed the link buying tactics undertaken in attempts to improve Google rankings for the highly sought-after keyword “car insurance”. They even kindly suggested we look at marketleap.com to see just how many paid links they acquired. So we did:

David B revealed that after getting as high as page three on Google the company decided to “start purchasing links in bulk” despite knowing this was against Google’s guidelines. Shortly after Gocompare were dealt a rankings penalty for their sloppy use of paid blog links Bullhorn suffered a similar fate.

They fell to the depths of page eight and are currently even worse off, ranking just inside the top 100.

Wait, It Gets Worse

As if that was not bad enough David B’s confession also revealed Bullhorn’s participation in multi-link banners; another paid links campaign that saw them penalised by Google for a whole raft of keywords.

If these comments can indeed by attributed to Bullhorn then fair play to them. They played the game and lost but are big enough to admit it. Of course I doubt they’d have been so open if their actions had been successful but hey, who are we to complain?

This rare insight into the world of corporate SEO demonstrates the pressure these sites are under to compete in the search arena and the lengths some will go to in order to achieve that goal.

Whether badly advised by an agency or through their own actions Bullhorn have suffered a massive setback in their SEO campaign.

You Cannot Be Serious

In a rather bizarre closing comment David B stated that Bullhorn had since moved to focus their efforts on other insurance products and that ranking for car insurance keywords “isn’t of major importance”.

Strange given the lengths they went to, the search traffic (and money) associated with that group of keywords and the current title tag of their homepage: Car Insurance | Cheap Car Insurance - Bullhorn.co.uk Compare Car Insurance Quotes Bull Horn. Anybody else see a keyword theme there?

Join The Discussion

So, just how bad was this link building campaign? Would you have been this open about your SEO activities? Join the discussion and share your thoughts.

Like this post? Then click on the links below to read more posts that are similar to this one.

• PayPerPost Blogging – Paid Links At Their Least Effective
• The Digital Point Coop Network = Millions Of Poor Quality Links

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