So in September 2008 Bankrate purchased creditcardguide.com for a cool $34 million.

Soon after creditcardguide.com dropped ~40 positions from their #1 position. Why?


Exhibit A: http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/b ... aspx?guid={817D0371-0BEE-4B83-BA56-E3A13CD1A68F}&dist=TQP_Mod_pressN

Press Release boasting Google rankings:

"As an affiliate of Nationwide Card Services, which we acquired this past December, we have worked with CreditCardGuide and have been able to watch their growth and momentum firsthand," stated Thomas R. Evans, President and CEO of Bankrate. "CCG has done a great job of developing its organic traffic and ranks highly in a number of important credit card search terms. Adding more direct, high-quality traffic to our credit card business will grow our revenue and improve the margins in this important category," Mr. Evans added.

Why would Google penalize the website?

I suspect Google decided to take a look into the reasons why creditcardguide.com ranked so well. What they found were blackhat link building practices (ok, at least gray) practices. Frankly it doesn't look really horrible to me, but I can see how Google would easily determine that the links were not built naturally.

Exhibit B: Link building on .edu websites

(I'll qualify this one.... I found other .edu links, and frankly they didn't look bad to me... this one could be argued)

Exhibit C: Purchased links (templated)
...and here, and here, and...

...this is probably the the obvious one that got them penalized. Is it a crime to buy links? No, it's advertising. But, Google controls the horizontal and the verticles [pun].

Well, what about link normalization? Would that be the one where the jump of link or jump in link pr from bankrate and the press releases that were distributed on the acquisitions behalf got it the 33 penalty?

CJ, there is a strong argument for an influx of backlinks due to the exposure. But... today I find them on page 7 for their own URL keywords -- so it doesn't look quite as automated. ...unless all of our conversation created enough backlinks to stack penalties.

I'd swear it were a PR reset due to DNS revision -- but I didn't see any evidence of that.

...oh wait -- ok, perhaps there was an IP address change for DNS. Last revision to their DNS record was 12-Aug-2008, and the press release came out in September. Now, the nameserver is different from bankrates' nameserver, and so is the IP addy:

CreditCardGuide 207.154.60.116
Bankrate 63.111.3.133

...but that doesn't mean the ip address for ccg.com didn't change.

So, there is another hypothesis... but still open to more theories and additional supporting evidence.