Video Transcript – Googlee Blues

Googlee Blues – original post here

Welcome back Rankers! Having a good week? Okay, I’m going live on Periscope at the moment. If you don’t know Periscope, it’s a live video app . . . Really, Twitter owns it now. They acquired it. And so you need a Twitter account, I believe, to use it. We’re going live right now. I’ve got a bunch of people watching live. Our only problem is they can’t chat. Normally, you can chat. There’s some bug. I’ve done something wrong with the app. And I’ve looked at all the settings everyone’s told me to look at, and doesn’t work. So it doesn’t matter.

I want to tell you a little story. We’ll get into the exploit that we were talking about a couple of weeks ago, people clicking on links and those sorts of things. But I want to tell you a story. About two months ago, I bought one of these. And yes, I did just pick up a ukulele. And I was challenged by one Sean Callanan, [email protected]. All complaints should be sent to him. He challenged me to use it on the show. So he challenged me, it was the end of May I think at PeSA on the Gold Coast, to play on the show.

So today is the day. So apologies to musicians and sensitive people with sensitive ears, which is probably most of us. Twenty-four, well, no one’s dropped off yet. And I’ve told them I’m going to play the ukulele. Maybe they’ve just all switched mute on.

Okay, we’re recording. Everything’s running. Let’s go.

Well, get on the interwebs
Boy you can’t lose
So I got on the interwebs
I thought I’d sell some shoes.
I bought some back links in Asia
And now I’ve got the Googlee Blues

So I called the pros in
I got some SEO
Yeah, I called the pros in
And they’re goes all my dough
There’s a big fat penguin I want to punch in the nose.

So I did a disavow
I was on my ranking knees
Yeah, I did a disavow
Oh, Google, I’m so sorry
I’ve confessed and recanted
Now, Google won’t you re-rank me?

Well, my rankings came back
I was feeling fine
Yeah, my rankings, they came back
And it was party time
And then a big fat panda said, “Hey, your arse is mine”

So now, I’m into social
Facebook and YouTube
Yeah, now I’m into social
With those two I can’t lose
I ain’t going back to search to get those Googlee Blues

So get on the interwebs
Careful as you go
Yeah, get on the interwebs
Beware my tale of woe
Because one thing’s for certain
There’s more to learn than you can know

Yeah one thing’s for certain
There’s more than learning you can know

I’ve just gone off, what happened? Am I still live? Am I still live? Yes, I’m still live. Woo-hoo. Okay, so that’s the song.

Yeah, there was a warning at the beginning of the show, in case you missed it, about language. So anyway, let’s get back to the show.

So what I want to talk to you about is an exploit that we looked at a few weeks ago. You may remember I was telling you about an email that I got from a couple of guys. One’s in Toronto. And the other one is in Queensland, I believe. And he was telling me about a exploit that Rand Fishkin, Danny Sullivan, a bunch of other big celebrity SEOs have been talking about, which was clicking on people’s links and then having the rankings go up based on those links. And it was a really, really well written article. So it was from Nick, didn’t write the article, it was his business partner that write the article.

The article is from a company called vitalvectors.com. There’s a long blog post there. I’ll put a link in the blog post. And basically, what they’re saying is there are sites like this one, which is called microworkers.com, where they post jobs. And the idea is that these are really easy jobs to do. And you only get 40 cents for every job that you do. And some of the jobs are click search. So you would go in, do a search in Google, and click on the link that they want you to click on and then go into the site and look around and then disappear.

One of the other things that they reckon as a bit of an exploit is that you would maybe click on the number one result and then hit the back button just as fast because that would be seen by Google as a negative for that site. So I asked you guys a couple weeks ago to, hey, can you go and click, go into the search for SEO Melbourne, and click on the link and a have a look at the site. And basically, this is the result. This is you guys clicking right here for this particular phrase only or this particular page.

So I’m in Analytics at the moment, and I’m looking at this particular page from last week to the week before. And you can see there the big blue spike is when I asked everyone to click. So we’ve got about 130 clicks, 133 clicks. That page would normally have 20 or something, not that many. And our rankings fell. So thanks. Just stop clicking, all right? They fell. They came back, really. Just normal movement is all I saw in this particular instance. Maybe it’s going to be that way for if you’ve got thousands and thousands of people clicking. But certainly, for the work that I looked at and what we did, it was not. It was just not an exploit at all.

So these are sorts of jobs that this microWorker site has. You can see here, “$500 Coles Voucher” sign up. So the idea of this is that you’ll earn 40 cents if you do this. If you go and click on the . . . If you see this banner on this particular page, you click on it. You complete the form on the first page. And then you check your email, and you confirm the subscription. So basically, what this is, is your old-style ad fraud, click fraud, where people have probably got these ads on their own sites. I don’t know what network those Coles vouchers are on. But I’ve seen them come up on some odd sites; I’ve got to tell you.

So, yeah, maybe it works for some. And certainly, the ones that they have . . . In the blog post, they’ve talked about a couple of video ones. And one is a local guy. I actually contacted this guy who’s in New South Wales. Let me just bring him up. This one here. And it was for the search “liposuction Sydney” that their video ranks number one in YouTube. And basically, you can see here there is a job specifically to go and log into YouTube, watch that video right until the end, and then click if you want or whatever you want to do. And that one, “liposuction Sydney,” I would think is a really competitive phrase. And their video is number one. And there’s jobs in microWorkers to get it to number one.

I don’t know. Certainly, the tests that we did, it didn’t work.

Hopefully, that’s helpful. We’ll see you next week. Thanks very much. Bye.