Amazing Google Israel behavior

[Roie]

Hi,
just wanted to point out an amazing behavior on Google Israel and get your opinions on this:
"car insurance" is a very competitive term in any country and Israel is no exception - for years everything was "normal" and most top 10 sites featured highly branded insurance companies and top lead aggregators all investing heavily in SEO. A few months back page 3 and above started showing completely irrelevant sites (movie theaters etc) now its fixed, but suddenly number 2 on organic results is an obscure blogspot post - and it's been in the top 10 for over a month month now.

I should also mention that for this specific term, in the past 3 years no site took first spot for a period longer than 6 months, usually less. I should also mention that Israel is a very small market with limited amounts of sites and link exchange and buying is practiced by (my rough estimate) at least 60-70% of active sites (including many GOV and EDU)

The only conclusion i can draw is manual manipulation by Google trying to send a message to these overly SEO'd sites?

[wheel]

No, the message Google is sending is that you should immediately call the owner of that blog post and get a link from that page.

OK, maybe that's not Google sending that message, maybe it's the voices in my head again. But it's the message you want to hear nonetheless. I've seen what you're describing a few times through the years and I view it as an opportunity.

[indyank]

This is the paage 1 reservation for the blogspot posts, that I was mentioning in some other thread.It is a reserved position and any blogspot post can take this position with good unique content and other reasonably good seo factors...