Google Bans Itself Again By Banning BeatThatQuote.com

Mar 8, 2011 at 10:43am ET by Barry Schwartz

Google both acquired and then penalized BeatThatQuote within a single day.

Yesterday the financial price comparison site, BeatMyQuote.com was purchased by Google for £37.7 million. And within the same 24-hour period Google decided to slap on a penalty to lower it’s ranking due to violating Google’s webmaster guidelines.

As the news came out that Google acquired the price comparison site, SEOs like SEOBook called out the site’s aggressive SEO tactics. Aaron Wall shows how the site was using techniques that went against Google’s guidelines, such as link buying, doorway pages and other questionable techniques.

Shortly after, BeatThatQuote.com was penalized in Google. It wasn’t an all outright ban, being that the site is still indexed but if you search for the name of the site, it does not come up at the top of the results anymore.

Here is a picture and yes, it ranked yesterday:

Related Stories:

Google To Acquire BeatThatQuote.com

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz

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http://www.polarbranding.com Polar Branding

Google is playing a great PR game with this by gaining so many authoritive links. In the words of Obi-Wan Kenobi, “If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine”…
http://mauricewalshe mauricewalshe

dear me Google really does have less common sense than Annie from being human.

Larry and Sergi need to sit down with Vint and get him to give them the inside story on how MCI got screwed over when on part of the Company went rouge and pursued short term gain that fracked the company up.

the same thing happened in Global Services in BT recently.
http://www.yougomedia.com You Go Media

Google Philosophy #7 – “You can make money without doing evil.” Not sure if anyone can say this is evil, I think it’s brilliant and shows Google is paying attention to even its own services and there own practice. To buy the service out is simply a business decision, not a search engine decision.

:) !! look at the publicity earned through this venture and penalty slap :D!~ amazing and brilliant. Great work Google, very impressed with your self slapping process!
http://www.michael-martinez.com/ Michael Martinez

This episode lends an entirely new meaning to the expression “due diligence”.
http://www.kevinlee.net/ Kevin Lee

We can probably assume that future acquisitions will go through at least a rudimentary SEO audit.