Maybe this deserves a blog post, but I'm lazy. So here is the back story from 10,000 feet.
I worked for a company that basically gave me 80% time. 20% of my time was supporting the products we already launched, the other 80% was experimenting and coming up with new products.
I was blogging kind of regularly back then (once every week or so), on a subdomain without any actual backlinks other than from a few "no-index" and "no-follow" links on social media. So technically my website should not have been in the top page for any search term and I shouldn't have had ANY traffic, but it usually was #1 or #2 for various WordPress and jQuery related searches (I had a couple of jQuery plugins and wrote some php hacks that eventually took down millions of websites), and I got 10k monthly visitors on average.
So I started looking into WHY I was the top result of those queries, and it was because when someone landed on my site with that query, the bounce rate was only 10-30% compared to most other sources being 85-90% bounce. The exact technical meaning of a bounce is lost on me now, but it had to do with how long you stayed on the site without leaving or if you click on other internal links for the site.
So I proposed to the owner of the company, I would create a "Click Faker". It would go to google on your local PC, it would then search for a term you wanted to rank, then it would navigate the top 10 pages, if it found you, it would click your link, then spend 2-5 minutes navigating around your site before closing the window.
I first tried this with Selenium (or an equivalent back then), and Google blocked it almost immediately. So then I hacked together a headless version of chromium, with some standard but randomly generated user agent, and eventually expanded it to IE and Firefox as well.
And the marvelous thing is it WORKED! And surprisingly well. BUT you had to get your site in the top 100 results, and be running google AdSense before it would work. It also proved what we had long suspected that google would rank sites with Adsense higher than a website without (probably because of telemetry data they could gather).
The concept worked, we launched the product, and got a few dozen subscribers over the next month, BUT the demand just never materialized, and after 6 months we started seeing diminishing returns as google started captcha-ing our requests, and eventually it was no longer useful and we shuttered it.
Without a large enough network of consumer PCs on consumer internet, it was doomed to fail. The network needed to be around 1000 users before it would work. We even tried giving away free limited accounts (20 visits/day for free if you ran the script, and it stacked, so if you had 3 different PCs on 3 different ISPs - home/work/mom & dads house/etc - you would get 60 visits/day).
Ultimately, I think there wasn't enough education around it, and nothing we did marketing wise really helped.
> long suspected that google would rank sites with Adsense higher than a website without
Google says that they don't do that. I don't believe Google based on personal experience and it's interesting to see that you had some experimental confirmation.
> So I proposed to the owner of the company, I would create a "Click Faker". It would go to google on your local PC, it would then search for a term you wanted to rank, then it would navigate the top 10 pages, if it found you, it would click your link, then spend 2-5 minutes navigating around your site before closing the window.
Dumb question: how would google know you spent 2-5 minutes on that domain and navigated around it?
jermaustin1|3 years ago
I worked for a company that basically gave me 80% time. 20% of my time was supporting the products we already launched, the other 80% was experimenting and coming up with new products.
I was blogging kind of regularly back then (once every week or so), on a subdomain without any actual backlinks other than from a few "no-index" and "no-follow" links on social media. So technically my website should not have been in the top page for any search term and I shouldn't have had ANY traffic, but it usually was #1 or #2 for various WordPress and jQuery related searches (I had a couple of jQuery plugins and wrote some php hacks that eventually took down millions of websites), and I got 10k monthly visitors on average.
So I started looking into WHY I was the top result of those queries, and it was because when someone landed on my site with that query, the bounce rate was only 10-30% compared to most other sources being 85-90% bounce. The exact technical meaning of a bounce is lost on me now, but it had to do with how long you stayed on the site without leaving or if you click on other internal links for the site.
So I proposed to the owner of the company, I would create a "Click Faker". It would go to google on your local PC, it would then search for a term you wanted to rank, then it would navigate the top 10 pages, if it found you, it would click your link, then spend 2-5 minutes navigating around your site before closing the window.
I first tried this with Selenium (or an equivalent back then), and Google blocked it almost immediately. So then I hacked together a headless version of chromium, with some standard but randomly generated user agent, and eventually expanded it to IE and Firefox as well.
And the marvelous thing is it WORKED! And surprisingly well. BUT you had to get your site in the top 100 results, and be running google AdSense before it would work. It also proved what we had long suspected that google would rank sites with Adsense higher than a website without (probably because of telemetry data they could gather).
The concept worked, we launched the product, and got a few dozen subscribers over the next month, BUT the demand just never materialized, and after 6 months we started seeing diminishing returns as google started captcha-ing our requests, and eventually it was no longer useful and we shuttered it.
Without a large enough network of consumer PCs on consumer internet, it was doomed to fail. The network needed to be around 1000 users before it would work. We even tried giving away free limited accounts (20 visits/day for free if you ran the script, and it stacked, so if you had 3 different PCs on 3 different ISPs - home/work/mom & dads house/etc - you would get 60 visits/day).
Ultimately, I think there wasn't enough education around it, and nothing we did marketing wise really helped.
mysterypie|3 years ago
Google says that they don't do that. I don't believe Google based on personal experience and it's interesting to see that you had some experimental confirmation.
recyclelater|3 years ago
alberth|3 years ago
Dumb question: how would google know you spent 2-5 minutes on that domain and navigated around it?