Well I meant to put this post out a few weeks ago, ever since I had my heart attack (At 28) if I’m going on holiday I unfortunatly can’t pay for standard Travel Insurance I have to look for “Travel Insurance For Pre-Existing Medical Conditions“.
This unfortunatly raises the bar quite a lot for what you have to pay, so being involved with Search as I am, I find myself digging deep into ways to find the best deal. At first I came across good old http://www.moneysupermarket.com/travelinsurance/. It seemed a good place to start as it does compare prices for Travel Insurance, however I couldn’t find a Insurance comparance engine for “Travel Insurance For Pre-Existing Medical Conditions“, it’s a niche market so this was fairly expected, however after reading the page at Travel Supermarket I decided to take the description used for the insurance I needed and placed this into Google i.e. “Travel Insurance For Pre-Existing Medical Conditions“.
The first result as can be seen below is: http://insurance.virginmedia.com/c/travel-insurance/pre-existing/medical/conditions/.
When I actually clicked on the page then I was presented with Travel Supermarket. I kept the tab open and went back to the Official Travel Supermarket website to see if the page was duplicate. Low and behold it was and after further digging around both sites, it appears that they are duplicated, both have pagerank and Google is classing different pages within each site with different Values i.e. Different pages rank for different terms associated with each site.
So just so you are aware the big boys also make mistakes with Duplicate content the two sites can be seen at:
- http://www.moneysupermarket.com/
- http://insurance.virginmedia.com/
I think I even found a third at http://www.virginmedia.com/money/insurance/ however this site didn’t work, either it was intermitent or they have decided to waste the pagerank 5 section of the website 🙂
I stopped digging at this point as I started to find many instance of duplicate text when I did my first search on Google for text off money supermarket which appeared on other sites.
It is always interesting to find information like this about, especially when you think about the sort of money Travel Supermarket spend on SEO, I suppose it’s not a problem from their persepctive because users wtill get delivered their content regardless of which site they land on, a bit naughty isn’t it Google?
What I find strangest about this is that virgin haven’t even have the content re-branded. White label aggregation solutions are ten a penny, so why maintain the money supermarket branding, when people buying from virgin insurance are looking to trust in the virgin brand.
This seems poorly designed from every view point.
Moneysupermarket may have let the the virginmedia site copy the content thinking that Google will see virginmedia as a duplicate and then filter virginmedia out of the rankings. But it looks like it’s gone the other way with Moneysupermarket being filtered out.
Leason – Google doesn’t always filter out the copier….unless virginmedia had that page first????