Google Gets Gamed
Well if there was ever any doubt that Google SRPs (search results page) could be gamed, the doubt should officially be gone now. Not only that, it can be gamed in order. This is a pretty hilarious link to a Google SRP showing an advertizement by a SEO company and if it goes away, here is a screenshot of Google’s SRP.
To me this is actually a little alarming, as you’d expect a search engine to be able to notice this form of blatant advertizing, but I guess the Googleplex is taking a coffee break or something. Pretty cool to see how it ranked in order like that where the cnames line up where when spelled out one by one they say, “you should switch to virante” Cute!
August 24th, 2006 at 3:16 pm
Here’s my quick analysis:
1. Other than the pages involved in the scheme, there aren’t any other pages that have the phrase “five seo excuses” in them, so there was basically no competition. Note: Google will boost the score of pages that contain the terms in the order specified in the search, even if the search isn’t a phrase search.
2. Google ranks pages highly if they are linked to from domains that are themselves ranked highly. In this case, the page on zeromillion.com seems to be the key. zeromillion.com contains lots of content that is linked to from lots of other sites on the web, so Google “trusts” it.
3. To get the pages in order, it looks like they just varied the number of links between the pages. The first page has the most links to it and the last page the least, etc.
The only thing I don’t quite understand is the purpose of the dezejar.tripod.com page. It contains the phrase “five seo excuses” but links to a different page on zeromillion.com instead of to the target pages. My best guess is that it just causes google to rank zeromillion.com more highly for that phrase.
Anyway, I agree this is a very cute hack.
–Dean
August 24th, 2006 at 7:10 pm
Well, at least each of the pages has 0 pagerank.
August 24th, 2006 at 10:09 pm
I think it’s an interesting time when Google’s algorythm is so transparent that companies can own any page they want and fill it with spam, but yes, Dean, I believe your take on how they did it is fair. It’s not really rocket science anymore, I think it’s time to move on to a new algorythm. At least MSN and Yahoo are doing interesting search stuff these days.
Edward, yes, that’s true, but so does every page for the first 60 days or so, so that’s not surprising. Page rank really doesn’t mean much these days. I see websites with PR 7 or higher with less traffic than this site that only has a few PR 5 pages. It’s really just another example of a flawed algorythm. Even they don’t use it.