Not to sound like that guy.. but I'm skeptical of their model.
Normal price comparison sites make a ton of money.. why? because they dominate the search results. Makes sense.. hard to make a brand out of something that sounds boring like comparing prices. Yet I think Leaky is betting the brand will attract users.
And if they do acknowledge they'll need search engine visitors, then that's a huge risk because 1 penalty and they're dead. And where's the "thick" content? Google frowns upon any site that looks like thin content.
Second, this is insurance. Noone's gonna compare prices regularly, like they do with regular purchases. It's not like airline tickets where people buy them 3-4 times a year either. It sounds like something someone would use once, then forget for a long time.
You are looking at this from the point of view of what's currently in the market - insurance affiliates who compete on who can better game Google. There is no reason why Leaky should get a penalty, they are in the insurance comparison business, not the SEO business.
While many people (I don't know if most people) buy more plane tickets than they do insurance, when it comes to commission, the insurance market is more lucrative than the airline ticket market. Airlines pay very little for every ticket sold.
If Google does it's job right (which I agree it doesn't always do) than if Leaky is the best online insurance comparison site than it will be the first result for that search term. I don't think Leaky should be worrying about this at the moment. The way the site currently works is how most visitors would want it to work, clean, fast and intuitive.
They are in both businesses. Without SEO, Leaky is going nowhere in the long-term. And to us, Leaky may seem like the best insurance comparison site, but if you don't have thick, valuable content (that can be crawled by search engines, you aren't going to be found.
Also, google "TeachStreet Panda". This was a site you could've said the same thing. "No way they should be penalized"... they went out of business after Panda because Google deemed their content to be non-valuable even though it filled a need.
Normal price comparison sites make a ton of money.. why? because they dominate the search results. Makes sense.. hard to make a brand out of something that sounds boring like comparing prices. Yet I think Leaky is betting the brand will attract users.
And if they do acknowledge they'll need search engine visitors, then that's a huge risk because 1 penalty and they're dead. And where's the "thick" content? Google frowns upon any site that looks like thin content.
Second, this is insurance. Noone's gonna compare prices regularly, like they do with regular purchases. It's not like airline tickets where people buy them 3-4 times a year either. It sounds like something someone would use once, then forget for a long time.