Click a link in Search Engine results to help positioning

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SEO Superstitions: Click a link in Search Engine results to help positioning

Claim: Clicking a link in Google and other search engines helps positioning for that page

Status: False (generally)

The claim is that if you get many people to search for a page using a specific keyword, and then click on the listing of your page in Google or another Search Engine that will improve the positioning of the page in search engine results for the keyword. If the practice is effective, it is certainly "gray hat" or Black Hat SEO. An enterprising and unscrupulous Web master could sent up a few software scripts that keep "clicking" the link.

It is true that Search Engines can and probably do keep track of the number of times a link gets clicked ("click popularity").

It is not known which engines utilize that information or how they use it, but probably MSN Live Search uses it. Here is the what one SEO guru says it would take to make link popularity work for you:

After your page has been accepted into the index of the click popularity search engine, go visit it. Do a couple of casual searches, visit some of the sites for a few of minutes and then come back.

Next, search for your page by using the keyphrase you are trying to get a top ten ranking on. Keep digging until you find your page and then click on its listing to get to your site. When you've arrived there, close the browser window and do not visit the search engine at least for an hour or so.

Because your IP address has been logged, do not try to repeat this process until a couple days have passed. Before doing it again, you should also clear out any cookies the search engine might have installed to your system. In Internet Explorer 5, this can be done by clicking Tools -> Internet Options -> Settings -> View Files and deleting all of the files in that folder.

Notice that cookies are also commonly used to store other information, such as passwords and user ID's of online discussion forums and such. That is why I recommend that you do not attempt playing with these things unless you know what you're doing and have written all of your user ID's and passwords down somewhere or remember them.

Naturally, at the rate of one click every two days it might take your page quite a while to get to the top. So, if you happen to have friends, relatives or other acquaintances that have their own computers and are willing to help you, you can instruct them to follow the above instructions and give your page(s) a click every now and then. Just as long as you are using different computers at different locations and remember to clear your cookies, it's very unlikely that someone at the search engine would notice what you're doing.

Playing hardball

Clicking your own listing and having your friends help you may not be entirely honest, but it isn't a very serious offense either. Too bad that because you have to keep a long waiting period in between clicks, boosting your ranking in that way is a long and frustrating process. There are easier ways than that, but they're more risky as well.

One of these faster methods is using non-transparent proxy servers that are open to the public. They will mask your IP-address, which fools the search engine into thinking that you're someone else than you really are, just as long as you remember to delete any cookies possibly used by the SE and change the proxy server in between clicks.
Source: Click Popularity

OK. I have a new Web site called "Windows." It has now been registered in Google and is the last listing among 1.4 billion or so sites listed for keyword search [Windows]. Google doesn't even show pages past 1000 listings, so how do I get Google to display it for that keyword? Let's say it is already listed at position 999, after a few months. I have to get to that display and then send the exact URL to my friends (theoretically, the URL of the Google page will also change as the page moves up in the listings). My long suffering friends and very extended family, all together, give that page 2,000 clicks in a period of a week. This is not a fun way to spend your leisure time. In that time, the top pages have gotten 200,000 clicks perhaps. I would really have to make a script that retrieved the precise URL of the search engine page that has that listing and then clicks the listing, and I would have to make sure the script "looks" like a real visitor and I would have to disguise the URL. I would have to do this for each of perhaps 2,000 pages in my Web site.

If the keyword is something like Sexonomy, a "word" that gets hardly any searches, or a particular phrase that is not very popular, then getting 50 clicks from your friends might make a difference. If the keyword is one that gets thousands of clicks, most of those are going to the top ranked pages for that word. 50 or 60 or even a hundred clicks to your page are not going to move it up very much against the top ranked page that might be a page from Wikipedia for example.

Ami Isseroff

October 4, 2008

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