Googlee Blues
UPDATE: Video transcript available for ‘Googlee Blues’.
Well that was interesting. I did the show live on periscope yesterday afternoon and recorded it. I also took the opportunity to complete a dare that I was challenged to back in May by Sean Callanan of SportsGeek & Beers Blokes & Business fame. So apologies for the song Googlee Blues, it won’t happen again!
A couple of weeks ago I got our viewers to carry out a test that Rand Fishkin & Danny Sullivan had been chatting publicly about. The reason for this is that I had been alerted to a blog post by a company called vitalvectors that claimed that people clicking on the results did in fact manipulate rankings. Their blog post detailed extensively how this technique was being used by the black hat industry. So two weeks ago I asked viewers to do the same on a specific key phrase “SEO Melbourne” .
Click Manipulation Results
Here are the results. We started on July 22nd. At that point we were ranked 16 if searched from Melbourne. Today we are also ranked 16.
This is not a great scientific experiment. I have no control set nor any details of the people clicking. As you can see though our rankings bounced around to as low as 20 and then back up to where we started. Higher on the graph above actually means a lower ranking.
I had 120 people do the search and click on the result. If you compare it when the clicks were done you’d have to come to the conclusion that it hurt our rankings. However you can’t look at these things in isolation. There are so many other factors to consider. For instance only 58 of the 120 searches were done from Melbourne. 3 were done from India. Could that be seen as a flag?
Conclusions
Whilst the microworkers site activities mentioned in today’s video would certainly be affecting paid advertising and probably Youtube rankings I can’t say (not from this test at least) that it’s affecting Google organic. The problem with these sorts of techniques is that it takes you away from focusing on winning a bigger audience. By the time you go to all the pain and effort of working on techniques like this you could have produced a kick arse piece of content that would help rankings far more than a 100 people clicking on your link. If your site is supported by advertising though, I can see why you would do it. It would only last until the advertisers saw rubbish conversion rates though.
Anyway apologies for Googlee Blues. My teacher was Youtube but the dare was issued by Sean. Send all complaints to sean AT sportsgeekhq.com 🙂
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
