Tricks used to manipulate Google search results

Andrea Orr

PALO ALTO: The popular Internet search engine Google said on Wednesday that
it was keeping an eye on some practical jokers who had found ways to manipulate
results of queries on its site. But it said it did not believe they were capable
of doing serious damage.

"I'm not sure people are doing it with malicious intent," said Matt
Cutts, a software engineer for Google, which is widely recognized as producing
the most relevant Internet search results. "Just about all the cases we've
seen have been humorous."

In a twist on an older practice of manipulating search engines by inserting
certain terms on a site, some people have found a way to get certain Web sites
higher ranking on Google by linking those sites to other Web pages.

The practice, known in the industry for some time, was discussed on Wednesday
in an article on the British Web site BBC.com. That story said that such false
links had been used in one instance so that the name of one Weblog publisher
would appear whenever someone entered the term "talentless hack" in
Google's search box.

False links have also been used, it said, to launch protests or to call
attention to recent events like the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter
Daniel Pearl.

While the earliest Internet search engines simply scanned the Web for search
terms, they have steadily come up with more complex techniques to weed out false
links -- such as porn sites trying to associate themselves with children's terms
-- and to improve the way in which search results are ranked.

Google has distinguished itself from other search engines with a
sophisticated system that considers the number of Web sites a given page links
to, in judging that page's importance. Practical jokers have discovered they can
manipulate this system by building multiple Web pages and then linking them to
the targeted site.

"It is something that Google and every search engine is going to have to
combat," said Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Watch, an industry
newsletter. "It is just a never-ending battle."

Still, Google stressed that the process of building all these false links was
time consuming, especially for the most popular search terms, which have
millions of real links to other pages.

"I think the amount of effort it would take to affect a search on a
popular term would stand out like a red flag," said Google's Cutts.