Google

So over the last 24-48 hours I have received a few emails from contacts in the Australian SEO industry asking me if I have seen the changes which center around the term “Car Insurance”.

Example email quote:

“On the head ‘car insurance’ term, there’s been more movement in the serps in the last 48 hours than the last two years.”

What seems to have happened is AAMI, has held the top spot for the term “Car Insurance” for over 2.5 years with 2 results a huge CTR boost for the brand, what now has happened is that AAMI has been moved to 5th position. And we now see Youi at number 1 position in the organize space (see image below)

car-insurance-changes

Now the question people are asking is why is this happening?

- My guess is this could be the recent change rolled out from Google been the “Over optimization” penalty – SEER Interactive does a good write up here – http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/over-optimization-penalty-speculation

This does not seem to be a manual penalty for “naughty SEO”, because I mean all Google would need to do is audit the link profiles on some of these key players in this term and it is “paid link central” for some of the top players. I am surprised these companies have not engaged with a long term viral link building/ inbound marketing campaigns, they seem to opt for the quick and cheeky paid link option which may be here now and gone tomorrow.

- Also as a note I do not work in the Insurance niche currently, I work in several other Enterprise SEO niches.

Please post your thoughts on this below -