Googlerank feedback loop
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.