How are these sites ranking!?!

[instinctive]

One of our clients is in the insurance industry and over the last 12 months we have seen an increasing number of low quality, newly registered, spammy sites achieving top 5 rankings for major keywords, which in turn is having an adverse effect on the rankings for our client.

Does anyone have any idea how the following sites have managed to do this:

http://www.multiquotetaxi.co.uk/ - 2nd for taxi insurance

http://www.motortradefast.co.uk/ - 1st for motor trade insurance

http://www.traders-insurance.com/ - 3rd for motor trade insurance

http://www.multiquotefleet.co.uk/ - 1st for fleet insurance

We have tried reporting the above sites, tried holding out to see if they get penalised and tried figuring out what they have done ourselves but cannot see how they have managed it.

Any ideas at all?

[Syed_Ozair]

All of these websites have 40+ page authority, 30+ domain authority and 200+ external links ... i think these are not new websites.

[instinctive]

Hi Syed

If you look into it properly, you will see that pretty much all of the links any of the sites have are firstly from completely spammy and unrelated sites and also use over optimised anchor text links.

As well as this, all of the above domains are less than two years old, which I would class as a relatively new site, especially in the insurance industry which is extremely competitive

[Syed_Ozair]

If you domain authority or link profile is lower then the competition, you would probably rank lower. However, i do agree that there are websites which look ugly and poorly optimized and do look spamy ... but still rank better. I tried reporting it to google but it is a slow process with no guarantees.

[Kingof5]

Black hat still works and always will. You can wait and hope they lose rankings or decide how much risk you're willing to take and try to beat them at their own game.

[JaneCopland]

David's right, unfortunately - even in the insurance industry, you see sites pop in and out, beating the big aggregators and private companies for short periods. It doesn't happen very often anymore with the blue-chip terms ([car insurance], [health insurance], etc.) but for the second-tier you can still see examples like this. Google isn't perfect at killing spam yet.

Keep in mind that some of the big algo updates regarding links in the past two years have not really been targeting spammers at all: they have been targeting otherwise legitimate businesses (from large corporations to "mom & pop shop" organisations) who've sought to use manipulative link dev tactics. The tactics that a lot of recent manual and algorithmic penalties have focused on are buying into link networks and schemes rather than outright automated, old-fashioned spam. You can still get rankings with blackhat / greyhat tactics and some of those rankings last a surprisingly long time.

I am not saying that the sites above are outright spam at all - they are affiliates who'll get burned in the end if their strategies aren't watertight, and they all seem to be owned by QuoteSearcher Ltd. Even the big guys in insurance get burned regularly - I'll stay away from citing actual examples due to past experience with agency-based client work, but big brands would rise and fall all the time during the five years I worked in insurance SEO.