Risk/avoid / CTR manipulation

I wanna talk about a black hat SEO tactic that's becoming more common recently. It's called CTR or click through rate manipulation.

This is a tactic that can help you rank higher in Google search results, but it breaks their terms of service. And yes, it really can work.

So I wanna talk about what it is, how it works, and why I still recommend against it.`n`nIf you've ever seen a competitor suddenly start ranking at the top of Google despite having worse reviews, less authority, and worse website content, there's a good chance they were using CTR manipulation. This is typically going to happen in the local map results, but it can also happen in Google's blue organic links.

So what is CTR? This is when someone sends a bunch of bots to search Google for a keyword you want to rank for and then scroll down Google search results and click on the website that you want to rank.

And if you do this enough, you can trick Google into thinking that people really like this brand or company for that particular term. And as a result, Google will move you to the top of the search results...

r out that information. But the main reason I highly discourage people from using CTR manipulation that if Google catches you, they can completely remove you from Google Maps.

And this can be devastating for a local business. For most local businesses, your Google business profile is more important than your website.

And this is becoming even more true as people more often get their recommendations from large language models. These models often pull information from your Google Business profile.

So what if you don't have a Google Business profile and you aren't a local business? There's definitely less risk in that case.

However, a lot of people have reported this tactic backfiring. The theory is that this bot traffic is low quality, not spending time engaging with your website.

And if Google is using those engagement metrics to determine ranking, that could have a negative impact. Now, SEO's debate whether that's true or not.

Personally, I choose not to mess with anything that might get me penalized by Google. If you decide to roll the dice, just know you're playing with fire...