¶ I recently started listing referrers at the bottom of each blog post. Where the referrer appeared to be a search engine, I display the search term separately. I started showing search terms as a matter of interest, but it had an unintentional effect: the search terms have fed back into Google and boosted the ranking of my pages.
The feedback process is simple and depends on an initial click-through from a Google search:
- A user does a search on Google; a Clagnut page appears in the results.
- The user clicks through to the page.
- The referral script detects the search terms and displays them on the page.
- Google sees the page has changed and re-indexes it.
- A different user searches with the same search terms; the page appears higher up the results.
- The user clicks through to the page.
- The referral script detects a slightly different URL (as often happens) and again displays the search terms on the page (the search terms are now displayed twice).
- Google sees the page has changed and re-indexes it.
- Another user searches with the same search terms; the page appears yet higher up the results. And so on…
On the face it, this seems like a good thing, however I’m a little paranoid about Google thinking I’m trying to cheat the system so I no longer show the referrals section to the GoogleBot indexer.
A glance at the most popular Google searches now reaching Clagnut also gives one an indication that many visitors are actually looking for the kind of self-gratification they’re unlikely to find here. Quite why Clagnut features so highly (#38 at time of writing) in a search for nude girls is beyond me. Ironically though, referrer spammers were responsible for pushing Clagnut higher up the very Google results pages the spammers themselves were aiming for.
Comments
1
I found myself having to do that a year ago. It seemed funny at first but began to get out of hand. Particularly with famous pop star Christina A*. Id made a passing remark about her. Another entry mentioned something about nudity. After I found my site getting hits for nude images of her I posted an entry laughing about it. Suddenly I found myself listed second and third on Google for photos that I didnt have. It became 10% of my bandwidth. So I deleted it and similar entries/pages. One of the best things about RSS search engines is that they dont mix entries together into an incoherent verbal stew.
2
I’m not so sure you have to worry about Google penalizing this just yet. There are countless examples of this used as a strategy to ‘spam’ google and move pages up in the rankings; I think this ‘method’ is something that Google has yet to algorithmically (?) filter out yet.
If it becomes a problem, you could check the user-agent and not give the referer data to googlebot.
3
Since Google is looking at all that cash, they have become somewhat erratic. Getting sort of senile. Age is catching up with them like a person ready to become a pensioner. When they cash out, the whole damn things gonna change. Just look at the other SE’s and what has happend to them after going public. I think the uppoer management is so concentrated on their business plan, that everyone else is asleep at the wheel. Haven’t seen a deep crawl url in my logs lately. Has anyone else seen this erratic behavior coming from Google?
4
I’m probably being stupid, but why exactly does this increase your pagerank?
Just because google re-indexes your page it doesn’t mean that it is guaranteed to rank you higher (or is it?).
Could someone please explain to me how this technique boosts your Google ranking?
Cheers!
5
James – it’s not the reindexing per se that is the boost, it is because I am displaying the searched-for keywords on the page and Google is picking up on these.
6
Hi, i tried the methods, but google now has kicked me out of their search engine altogether. I’m not sure what went wrong. my website has been deleted from their search engine. this is crazy.
I have alot of content and information on my website, but for some reason, they look at like spam. i’m not sure what else i can do.
7
Hi Alan,
I don’t think your site looks too much like spam. More like a site trying to sell beauty-products. But tell me: How did you promote it? Did you buy links? Could it be that these links where “bad” in any sense to Google? Could this be the reason for being kicked out?
Best Regards,
Ren C. Kiesler
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