eKaiser Insurance Sucks.com

One way that Google and other search engines judge the quality of a website and calculate its position in the search results is based on the number of sites linking back to it (called backlinks).

We receive Google Blog Alerts for the phrase ‘kaiser permanente,’ and this morning we began receiving alerts for numerous keyword-stuffed articles with slightly rearranged content, that are obviously intended to generate backlinks for search engine manipulation purposes. All of them are on ‘article submission sites,’ which are known to exist for the sole purpose of generating backlinks, and all were authored by someone with the comical name of Groshan Fabiola, which in all likelihood is not a real person. Each of the articles links back to ekaiserinsurance.com, and in the link text are the phrases Kaiser health care, Kaiser health insurance, and Kaiser health plan. By linking back to its website with that particular text, eKaiser Insurance is attempting to rank its site in the top of the Google search results for those terms.

From one of these article sites, articlesbase(dot)com:

“Submitting articles has become one of the most popular means of generating quality backlinks and targeted traffic to your website.”

A link on the same page takes you to their content spooler, which states:

“Incredible Software Creates Hundreds Of Article Variations Ready For Submission… 100% Guaranteed To Escape The Duplicate Content Filter!”

While we don’t want to link to any of the articles directly, which would create more ‘Google juice’ for these spammers, we are including screenshots of a couple of the bogus postings below. Note how they both say basically the same thing in a different way, with certain phrases that Kaiser and ekaiserinsurance.com would like to to dominate in the search results being repeated as often as possible. Click on the images to see a larger version.

The first is titled ‘Using Kaiser Permanente Online’:

And this one is called ‘Many Kaiser Permanente Health Insurance Options’:

Kaiser has always engaged in dirty search engine optimization (SEO) tactics, called Blackhat SEO. In November and December of 2005, Kaiser’s SEO people spammed kaiserthrive.org’s link to thousands of blogs, using a blog spambot through open proxies to avoid identification, in an attempt to get Kaiser Permanente Thrive Exposed banned from Google. They weren’t successful, but it is Kaiser’s willingness to engage in such unethical tactics that should concern people who are considering Kaiser Permanente for their health plan.

A few questions you might ask yourself before you purchase a health plan through eKaiser Insurance:

Is this the kind of organization I want providing my health care?

If they are willing to resort to unethical marketing practices, why should I believe they will be ethical in their delivery of health care?

There is certainly plenty of evidence available to suggest that they are not.

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