Spotted another site in the top 20 of Google for ‘car insurance’ - Car insurance is a really competitive search term that generates a huge amount of conversions, so it is a battle ground for spam sites to get onto the first page.

The other day i reported on sitenumberone breaking into the top 10 for a couple of weeks and yesterday i noticed quicksilhouette.whsites.net in the top 20.

This one is doing a really crappy spam technique but one that has worked for a short period of time and even a day in the top 20 of car insurance can be big money.

The site seems to be down today, (possibly because it is hosted on a free hosting network and they have exceeded their bandwidth for being in the top 20!).

Here is what they have done:

They are doing a very simple form of cloaking - showing the search engines something different to the users. The have created some content that is displayed to the user:

and some content visible in the source of the page that contained links to other sites. The visibility was hidden in the CSS file. The content was then broken into small pieces of text through <span> tags and making it look continuous through <nobr> tags. I think they may have done this bit to make it look like the text is a hidden navigation structure and not a large block of hidden text.

This is a old technique to hiding content so why has it worked?
Well, it looks like it may have been a couple of small factors:

1) It’s not the hidden content on the above car insurance site that is helping them but the hidden content on the link network pointing to it. The network pointing to it have no authoritive links but it is doing the same cloaking technique as quick silhouette resulting in hidden links pointing to quick silhouette. Now the content may not offer much benefit but the links could still be followed by the search engine passing on link equity to the quick silhouette site.

2) The second factor is a bit more interesting and offers more insight into what Google is currently looking at. Quick silhouette is hosted on a web hosting network - whsites.net. This results in the domain having a huge amount of links and many of authoritive ones.

The second point and the sitenumberone factors offer the same outcome, that Google is looking more at the domain authority from link juice being passed to the overall domain and holding weight in Google’s trust of the site.

Both sites have now dropped out of the results but there is a link between these two sites and both the internal linking structure and overall domain authority, factors that you should consider when optimising your website.