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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.

I'm not completely familiar with how PLAs are incorporated into GA. When you say the conversions are coming back as organic traffic - is it for brand or non-brand? If you're analyzing the data in GA by the last non-direct channel attribution then this could definitely have an impact on how many conversions appear if the funnel is more complicated. Are your items rather expensive? Is there a longer research phase to your products?

Hi, The drop earlier in the year is linked to the fact that we had a complete rebuild and redesign of the website which led to some of our rankings dropping, we were gradually recovering most of our ranking positions but now have seen them drop off severely. I have just found that a site we have an advert on (www.jr-leasing.co.uk) has put the advert as a site wide link and this is sending over 17,000 links to our home page, could this be playing a part? Thanks