Have Google penalised Beatthatquote.com?

Posted on 08. Mar, 2011 by Richard Falconer in Digital Marketing

Yesterday’s announcement that Google had purchased online comparison site beatthatquote.com for $37.7 million caused a bit of a stir online with numerous commentators suggesting Google would be wading further into antitrust territory with the purchase.

Today Aaron Wall from SEO Book wrote an article “outing” various optimisation techniques beatthatquote.com uses which are against Google’s terms of service.  Not least of which is buying links.

We took a of a search on Google for “beatthatquote” (actually “beatatquote” but it shows “beatthatquote”) this morning and saw this:

I searched again a short time ago and saw:

Wow! Google seemed to have penalised the site.

Checking where the result had gone, my suspicions seem to be confirmed:

The results are right underneath Aaron Wall’s original post.  Coincidence?

Richard Falconer

Tags: beat that quote, cse, ethics, finance, Google, links