Google acquires BeatThatQuote, a UK Finance Comparison Site.
Yesterday beatthatquote.com was acquired by Google for a deal worth £37.7 million. The comparison site compares deals across a variety of financial products including mortgages, insurance and credit cards.
The response to this acquisition has provided two different offshoots of conversation. Firstly being the diversification of Google from an internet gateway to a channel player. Secondly, the ramifications for other comparison sites if Google continues to penalise similar companies for actions that they, through BeatThatQuote, are allegedly endorsing.
We’ve already seen Google introduce Google Shopping Comparison. More wide-spread in the US, Google is featuring more and more in search results for finance terms in the UK such as this example below on the search term ‘credit cards’. Not only do they feature in P1 they also have an additional extension parameter within their ad in the form of a drop down (not available to other Adwords advertisers). Upon clicking through this ad, I do question what is so credible about this site when other sites are so heavily penalised.
SEOBooks.com takes the angle of penalisation and the consistency, or lack of consistency, when taking action against sites.
According to SEOBooks.com, Google has, on multiple occasions, penalised other UK-based finance sites for SEO issues & link buying. However, now that Google owns one of these sites in Beatthatquote, are they now penalizing Peter only to legitimise the same action for Paul? Time will tell how this one unfolds, however it’s certainly going to be interesting to watch.
