Is it possible to manipulate Google’s suggested search?

One of the newish features around Google search is suggested search. I’m sure you’ve seen or used it, and it can be quite handy. I blogged about using it for keyword research and profit last year.

Anyway, here’s an example:

Of course, this begs the question, “How is Google deciding which suggested results to show up?”

The answer is tricky; lots of SEO’s have been trying to crack the code.

Quite a famous SEO, Brent Payne ran some experiments last year using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.  Mechanical Turk is an online, human powered workforce for developers and businesses. Some tasks can’t be performed by computers, so for example, as a business you might want your corporate videos transcribed. You can set up the task within Mechanical Turk and ‘workers’ will get the job done for a (usually small) fee.

What Payne did was ask people to search for “brent payne seo” at Google and before long it became a suggested search result when you typed in “brent payne”.

Later he was able to create a now famous “brent payne manipulated this’” suggested search result.

It seems that sheer volume of searches can influence what is displayed by Google. Having said that, it should be noted that if you try and game the system using tools like Mechanical Turk Google does seem to be able to identify the behaviour and remove the suggested result. “Brent Payne SEO” no longer shows up.

For some businesses, suggested search results can be a boon, especially when product searches are associated with your brand.

Here’s another example, where a search for ‘hotels’ displays results for several popular hotels:

In terms of reputation management, many companies have complained about the fact their brand is often displayed with unfortunate associations, such as ‘brand scam’, or ‘brand sucks’.

Obviously people are often very tempted to click on these suggested results to see what the fuss is about.

Other experiments have been conducted to see if social media channels such as Twitter can influence the suggested results.

Using a variety of the above tactics I think you can manipulate the results for profit. If you can get your best selling product showing up when someone searches for your brand, you can encourage more traffic to the product page, increasing the chances for sales.

Black hat? I’d venture to say so. Be careful and keep your head under the radar if you decide to give it a try!

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Chris Thomas heads up Reseo, a search engine optimisation  company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.