BeatThatQuote.com

» see beatthatquote.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Google bought this company on a Monday in March 2011 and demoted it on the Tuesday. That sentence is the whole reason the site is worth a grave, and it is also the reason anybody outside British personal finance ever heard the name.

BeatThatQuote.com was founded in February 2005 by John Paleomylites as a UK price comparison site. It quoted car and home insurance, loans, utility tariffs, the usual British comparison-site inventory. It worked: revenue was 7.8 million pounds in the 2006 to 2007 financial year, which in that market put it behind the giants but comfortably alive. On 7 March 2011 Google acquired it for 37.7 million pounds, roughly 61 million dollars, and the stated plan was to use the technology to build financial comparison into search itself.

The problem surfaced within a day. BeatThatQuote had been running the sort of aggressive link campaign that Google's own webmaster guidelines forbid, including a partnership with Oxfam that produced a site called CompareForGood.com whose homepage was essentially a wall of links redirecting back to BeatThatQuote. Aaron Wall wrote it up on SEO Book on 8 March 2011. Google acted the same day, and a site it had owned for about 24 hours stopped appearing on the first page of results even for its own brand name.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the funny part ~

The penalty ran the standard 30 days, except it did not. Google lifted it roughly two weeks in, and then reapplied it about a day after that, which meant the same search team banned the same Google-owned property twice inside a month. A spokesperson gave the line the situation demanded: Google strives to enforce its webmaster guidelines across all websites, including websites owned and operated by Google.

There is no evidence anyone at Google knew what they were buying, in the SEO sense. The acquisition went through a corporate development process and the penalty came out of a search quality process, and the two apparently did not speak to each other until a blogger made it a story. Google had spent the previous four years telling webmasters that buying links would cost them their rankings, and in March 2011 it demonstrated the policy on a property it had just paid 61 million dollars for.

~ the day it died ~

No announcement marks the end, so the archive has to supply it. The Internet Archive captures beatthatquote.com at full size, around 8.6 KB, as late as 23 December 2012. The next capture, on 3 January 2013, is 2.67 KB and contains a page title and an analytics tag and essentially nothing else. That stub then sits unchanged for the next two years. The comparison engine went off somewhere in that eleven-day window at the turn of the year.

Google folded what it had bought into Google Compare, launched the financial comparison product it had wanted all along, and closed that in March 2016. The domain is still Google's. Type beatthatquote.com into a browser today and you land on the Google homepage, which is a tidy summary of the transaction: 37.7 million pounds, converted into a redirect.

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