I was reading away at SEO Chat the other day when I came across a technique that I’ve never seen before (yes, this does happen 
) and thought it would be worth sharing on my blog.
It basically involves tricking Google into thinking you are gaining more clicks from a brand search in Google’s listings. How? Well basically you do a search in Google for your brand name (eg. bal4) then, using FireFox, copy the link shortcut from your own listing in the search results and use this shortcut as your “home” link in your website’s HTML. So now each time someone clicks on you home link on your website it will seem to Google that this user has clicked on the search listing for your brand term.
Recently “SEO Gurus” are beginning to believe that click throughs for brand terms in Google are influencing the search results, which when you think about it would make sense if clicks were true, but as you can see it can be easily manipulated. I personally feel click throughs will only influence personal search results when you are logged in to your Google account (something Google have tried with PPC results), for example if you have searched for “bal4” 10 times and clicked on other sites but not clicked on my site then it would slide down the results, but when you log out it is back to its original position.
So would I use the technique above? Not a chance in hell, it is blatantly obvious that you are trying to trick Google and I guess that if someone reported your site then it would result in a penalty. Though I would like to test it somehow to see if it does have any effect, maybe try it on a client’s site… hmmm… just kidding.
February 29th, 2008 at 9:50 pm
Interesting thanks for sharing, but note that the google url that all links are routed through serve two purposes:
1) To stop other search engines from spidering google serps and indexing those sites via Google (google doesn’t want to share its database of sites)
2) To identify user traffic patterns, which definitely are being used for something - not necessarily rankings. But I think it generates a unique url for each search. The urls don’t seem to be the same on each search, so you would need to get the source of the serp page with your sitename - parse the code and get the url and then append it showing it as a home link. That would be the most reliable way of doing this - but if they’re showing urls based on the ip used to access it - it would probably only show all those clicks/stats under the ip of your server that is accessing it.