Some of you may be wondering how I get the source material for all the crazy things I write. It's easy. There is bad advice about life insurance everyday. Specifically, I go to Google News and enter this search 'allintitle: "life insurance".' Then I sort by date instead of relevance.
So if you want to be the next me, now you know you know just a little bit more about how to do it.
Now I'm going to talk about something I found in that search that is far from news. And frankly I am ashamed that Google would pick up this feed. I mean it's even worse than all the self-serving press releases that flood this search. I know that if I left the default of relevance instead of date, I wouldn't find these types of results for life insurance in the title, but this site should not be in the news feed at all.
Because this blog is about everything that is wrong with life insurance in the news - that's why. Also, because I can do what I whatever I want to.
The site in question is Monitor Bank Rates (no follow), which looks like a cheap knock off of Bankrate. Okay, even Bankrate has too many commercial interests to be objective. Still, these other guys are lousy.
The page in question has grammar and spelling errors throughout. You know, the type of stuff a free text editing program like Open Office would pick up. That's journalistic integrity.
Oh, then it's stuffed with keywords like "insurance" "life insurance" and "insurance coverage" with links out to the old establishment. You know, the big insurance company names I won't mention here - all of them.
They are giving away the generic keywords to the big guys, so they can keep the long tail words for their internal links. "Best life insurance quotes" is too specific to point to someone else. I hope someone at Google is paying attention to this, so they can slap companies like this.
Mind you, I don't read material of this quality, but I found it through Google News when I was looking for rotten stuff to write about. The whole article and life insurance portion are wrapped around a feature that promises to help me find the best life insurance quotes if I enter my zip code. Okay, you zip code has nothing to do with life insurance rates. Not in the US anyway.
I went on ahead and did it just to see what type of quality this misspelled website sent me to. I got a list of about 7 life insurance quoting companies. Some were individual companies, others were the type that collect your information and sell it off as a lead. Um, no thanks.
Now you all know to avoid this site, and hopefully Google learned that Monitor Bank Rates is not a news source (or really all that credible).
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