[LINK] Haneef transcript anyone?

Scott Howard scott at doc.net.au
Sat Jul 21 16:47:32 AEST 2007


On Sat, Jul 21, 2007 at 12:36:44PM +1000, Adam Todd wrote:
> Create a script that monitors your page, when googlebot picks it up, 
> regularly do searches for the relevant keywords.  When your page 
> appears on the link, get it hundreds of times per hour and voila - 
> suddenly you have a high click ratio.  Direct the get's via proxy 
> servers or random allocated IP addresses from a class C or greater 
> and you have gets coming from all over the place.
> 
> Surely not.

Yes, that will almost certainly work - for a short while at least.

Google's search ranking are massively dynamic, and _are_ based on the
amount of traffic to a site (along with a number of other factors)

I have a site which has a very burst traffic pattern, as well as a
lot of other sites linking to it (over 20,000 at last count).  At times
it's traffic will spike for a few days (or even a few weeks) after it
gets mentioned on a site like Digg/Slashdot/NY Times, which happens every
month or two.

For the past 6 months or so I've been watching where my site appears
in the google search results when you look for the term "megapixel". In
general it's "baseline" ranking is in the 21-30th result range (ie, page
3 of the results)

But when the site is seeing higher traffic levels, such as after a
mention on a high-traffic site, it's rank goes up dramatically - I've
even been as high as number 2.  Once the traffic dies off, so does the
result position (At the moment it's at 18th and dropping after a traffic
spike about a week ago).

> If the search engines are being this manipulative, isn't it time we 
> got together and built a real search engine?

Google's pagerank is very complex.  It may be possible to affect it for
short periods of time, especially when a page is new (in which case it's
slightly more likely to get a higher rating, as someone else mentioned)
but there's no way you'll be able to affect your rating long-term.

  Scott



More information about the Link mailing list