I have idolized Check n Go’s organic search rankings for a long time now. There site was officially crushed by Google. I was doing some research and noticed Check n Go’s keywords fell dramatically. This is proof that “Hell has no fury, like a Google engineer scorned.” This Google update addressed a lot of backlinking strategies that Google feels is Spammy.
The Google update came on April 24th with the code name: Penguin. Check n Go was ranking for over 4,000 keywords before and now are at appr. 600.
So what does this mean for Check n Go from a analytics standpoint?
Check n Go does not share their analytics with the world, so this is just speculation, but here goes anyway. When they ranked in the top 20 for the 4,000 plus keywords, this would result in a possible 951,000 searches, where Check n Go is in the top 20 of the Google organic search. Now, there is no way they were getting 951,000 clicks b/c a search shows multiple sites and they were not always the first result. Check Into Cash does publish their results at Quantcast.com. They get about 60,000 visits a month, surprisingly half of that is international. Not sure how that’ possible. You can view Check Into Cash’s stats here. On a side note, I think that’s pretty cool of Check Into Cash.
http://www.quantcast.com/checkintocash.com?qcLocale=en_US
To put this in perspective, they now rank (in the top 20 on Google) for a potential 95,000 searches. That is potentially about a 900% monthly decline is traffic. If we say they get 10% of these clicks, they were getting 95,000 clicks and now that number is closer to 9,000.
More bad news. The keywords that they lost are the high value keywords like: cash advance, payday loan, payday loans online among others. These are the keywords that are searched more than 10,000 times a month.
Google also poured a little salt in the wound. The term “check n go” is searched around 40,000 times per month. They were #1, now they’re #9. Ouch.
This comes late, but I was using Open Site Explorer to see what backlinks Check n Go was using. I thought it was a glitch because they had a lot of spammy looking .edu domains linking to them. Google has penalized other big companies, like JC Penny and Overstock.com.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0ArnCEjkoqUQxdEpFbmFfTlQ1VmtpQkFBTU1CSUczTWc&output=html
