Cheating Google Search
Google’s search engine is such a huge part of how most people navigate the internet that it seems obvious that a websites position in its search is vital to its success. But just how vital is it? As it turns outs being at the top of the search results is so important that companies are willing to risk punishments from Google and pay other websites to help their website stay on top.
A study last May by Chitika, an online advertising network of 100,000 sites, found that, on average, 34 percent of Google’s traffic went to the No. 1 result and about 17 percent of traffic went to the No. 2 result. There is a lot to gain by moving a website up in the ranks, but how would cheating this system work? Since Google uses a version of PageRank to score its search results, getting more inbound links to your site increases your score regardless of whether those links are coming from websites whose content are related to your site’s. For example, in 2011, Google found that thousands of websites unrelated to clothing such as “casino-focus.com” and “elistofbanks.com” had pages that linked directly to the J.C. Penney website with a short phrase containing the word “dress”. All of these websites transfered a portion of their PageRank to J.C Penney and the sheer number of them allowed J.C. Penney to easily be the number one search result for “dresses”. Based on Google’s keyword data, J.C. Penney was receiving approximately 3.8 million site visitors who searched for “dresses”. Or at least they were until they were punished for their trickery. J.C Penney’s average search position for 59 clothing search terms went from 1.3 to 52 due to Google manually adjusting its score. That punishment may seem severe but was actually a deviation away from Google’s normal punishment of a complete removal from search results that it had used on abusers regardless of their size.
J.C. Penney is not alone in trying to acquire links to bolster its search position. In fact there are entire market places devoted to buying and selling website links. One such website called TNX.net (which was used many sites that linked to J.C. Penney) allows users to earn TNX points or cash for linking to websites in the marketplace. TNX points can then be spent on buying links from other websites to bolster your sites search position and increase the amount of TNX points you will earn in the future from your links.
We learned about PageRank in class but we didn’t learn how easy and effective it was to cheat the system!
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/business/13search.html?_r=0