How to game Google Trends

by Patrick Altoft on February 23, 2008

Jason wrote an interesting post about Google Trends being gamed for political gain and I thought it was interesting to see think about whether it could be done.

Essentially Google Trends is just a buzz tracker so as long as you have the tools to create some buzz and attention it should be quite easy.

Let’s look at the factors you would need to control:

Search volume

Google takes into account the percentage increase in search traffic so as long as the query you pick has a long history of attracting very low search volume it is quite straightforward to send a very large increase. A few thousand IP’s searching for a phrase every hour might be enough.

Blog post volume

This is probably the most powerful factor in making the Google QDF algorithm kick in. Essentially you would just need to get hundreds of blogs all writing about a certain subject and ideally have most of them link to the “source” article.

News volume

News volume is harder to game as there are only a small number of legitimate news sources that will post about your hoax (unless it’s a really good hoax). Try sending press releases or using one of the countless forum members that promise to get you on Google News for $15.

Why?

Hundreds of blogs scrape Google Trends and output auto generated content based on results from the normal Google results and the blog search results. Other people look at hot trends manually for interesting things to write about. If you can create your very own blogstorm about your brand or name it might just snowball into some nice linkbait.