Odd spam method

Quote:

"This trick is somewhat hard to believe. It seems that some webmasters hire cheap Chinese workers to get higher rankings on Google. As strange as it sounds, these webmasters pay couriers on bikes to drive to various Internet cafes, search for their keywords and then click on the listing of the webmaster's site.

Over time, the listings go up. Actually, Google does have a click tracker in the result URLs. Until now, it had been unclear for what purpose Google uses this tracker. If this story is true, Google might use the number of clicks that a listing gets to determine the ranking of a web page."

from Axandra Search Engine Facts.

 

Botnets sometimes do the same. You can also use proxy lists for this purpose.

 

But the method I described above is pretty extreme.

 

Wow that's an interesting method, never heard of people using that before.

Seems too easy though, anyone could just use loads of proxies.

 

I don't think such method would be of any help as the searches from a particular country won't drive the rankings of a site. And it is impossible to match the volume of real searches that one can receive.

 

WE work with High School kids all the time and we ask a group of them to search for a specific keyword phrase and then click on a specific SERP listing that was at 83. Within the week it was at 9. No other factors were altered. Just the kids clicking.

When we looked at the analytics, there were 186 kids (unique uls) and 1.384 clicks in 6 days.

Real traffic will change the SERP position.

 

Anyone on DP offering this service? LOL!

 

The tactic used may seem extreme... but for a long time I thought people knew that serp performance was based on historical trends for visitors to a site.

It is one reason why webmasters are their own downfall... by searching for all their own keyword phrases and then not clicking on their site (or clicking on their site multiple times and therefore getting flagged as dubious behaviour/untrustworthy results and being discounted etc).

Is is also why new sites may be shown high up in the serps to draw attention to them and measure their performance/CTR against existing "authority" sites. If a new site out-performs an authority site it will bounce around a bit and gradually rise back up in serps if it consistently performs better against sites it ranks against in similar positions.

 

Seems urban legend. Not sure about the part with the clicking, at least the part with the biking is.

 

Google could probably track clicks from proxies unlike an Internet Cafe...IMO

 

From the school?

 

Google might think the more people look for a certain site, it might have good reputations since it getting more visits.

 

CTR is one of the factors Google uses to track SERP's and alter some websites ranking, but it's not the only one and might not be that helpful after all

 

Were they all searching from the same network?

 

Cheap Chinese workers !!~!!!!!!!!

 

agreed ................