Google Penalizes Beat that Quote on the Same Day It Bought It

In an interesting but perhaps not entirely surprising move, Google has penalized Beat that Quote in the search results less than 24 hours after acquiring the company. The price comparison site was found to be in violation of Google guidelines, using shady practices to prop up its pages in the search results.

After the acquisition was announced, attention was drawn to the aggressive SEO practices of the site which sometimes went clearly into black hat SEO tactics such as link buying.

Aaron Wall, the SEO expert behind SEOBook gave plenty of examples of how Beat That Quote was clearly abusing Google's own guidelines, with anything from gateway pages to paid links and even comment spamming.

"Google has on multiple occasions penalized other UK based finance sites for SEO issues & link buying. But now that Google owns one of the horses in the race, and that horse has been found to be using anabolic steroids, can they legitimately penalize any of their new competitors?," wrote Wall.

Well it seems that Google took notice and did indeed penalize Beat That Quote. It wasn't entirely removed from the search results, but it has been heavily demoted.

Even searching for it by name won't return it among the first results. The site has been penalized for 30 days, but it will be allowed to rank again after that.

It was Google's only option, it couldn't maintain legitimacy if it penalized other sites but allowed its own to slide by. And Google has been pretty vocal about going against websites and companies that engage in this type of SEO practices.

What's more, it will probably not hurt Beat that Quote that much, especially with all of the attention it got from being acquired by Google.

Beat that Quote offers price comparisons for loans and other financial products in the UK. Google has been offering a credit card comparison tool in the US and is likely interested in expanding its offering.

"Our team is excited about becoming a part of Google. We look forward to working with their engineers to create new tools making it easier for consumers to choose the right financial products," Beat that Quote wrote about the acquisition.