Guran does a sting op on Google

gets dummy site no 1 in a week

[wanderingmind]

[guardian.co.uk...]

Is there anything to this, guys?

[NoLimits]

It's not really hard to rank for a product that doesn't exist.... competition = zero.

I'd bet any average joe could "make up" a product and get it to rank high using little to no SEO at all.

Have them make a site on something that actually has competition and see how well their "tactics" work. black hat or white hat - it's hard to rank in Google for competitive terms.

[dibbern2]

Right, there's no trick to it if your target is an extremenly small market. I've done it dozens of times.

Its no accomplishment to brag about, just a factor of small numbers.

[jadebox]

The article doesn't mention that Google often puts new pages near the top of the results for a little while then moves them further down over time. I assume this is so pages about recent events appear near the top of the results while they are still topical. The fake product site may have moved to the top of the SERPs temporarily due to that effect rather than any of the optimizations they did.

-- Roger

[texasville]

Jadebox is eactly right. Getting to the top is not an issue. Staying there for say- six months? Diffeent altogether. I want to see him do a real estate or travel site with that success.

[cws3di]

Looks like a total fraud to me, trying to hype up that all SEO's are some sort of criminal manipulators. You would expect better from what is supposed to be a legit new service.

Obvious mis-representation in their article says there are 11,500 results for their phony keyword search, in quotes. Not true - when you go do the search yourself, there are 58 results. Most of those are recent blog entries trying to get traffic off the hype.

How is launching a website that has ZERO competition supposed to prove that someone can manipulate G? Geez, I'm gonna stop now before I start using strong cuss-words.
.

[FromRocky]

This must be a one-page site! Google just selects to list the home page only for any new site.

[Pico_Train]

Yeah, that's difficult.

Do a site on square aluminium tires for sports cars.

That'll be number one in no time.

Boring...