Fake Clicks Could Be Harming Your Rankings
Extra! Extra! Extra! Read all about it!
A new black hat, negative SEO tactic has been found harming rankings through fake “short clicks”. This has already been seen in the wild, harming rankings for important keywords.
Read on for more details, and how to deal with the new tactics.
The Skinny on This New Black Hat Attack
This reporting is thanks to the work of Erfan Azimi, the SEO behind the Google API leak.
To summarize his findings, Black Hat SEO’s apparently are taking advantage of an apparent weakness in Google’s click spam filters to send fake clicks to websites.
These clicks rapidly “leave” the website sending navigation signals to Google that “users” are dissatisfied with the quality of the results that they are getting.
Efran noted a website receiving a massive number of clicks in July and September of this year. This resulted in the website he was monitoring dropping in rankings from a top spot to #5 then all the way down to #35 for one of the site’s most important, money generating, keywords.
If you are interested in the more technical details, I highly recommend that you take a look at Erfan’s blog post about the issue.
What Should You Do to Deal With This Black Hat SEO Tactic?
Until Google is able to develop more ways to detect this issue. There’s not much that can be done to proactively combat this issue. Much like the Google Maps based attack that was found in early 2024.
However, there are some things that can be done to combat and identify this attack if it does happen to you.
Check Your Traffic
The first thing that you should do is monitor your click traffic for unusual spikes in the traffic to one or more pages on your site.
If you notice a spike in traffic, especially if it is aimed at a page that is ranking well for a highly competitive keyword then you may be seeing this attack.
Recovering Your Rankings
If you do see this attack and notice a drop in your rankings then you do have some things that you can do to fight back against this negative SEO.
- Make large edits to the affected page.
- This is no doubt annoying but by rewriting the content of the targeted page significantly you can trigger the “freshness boost” from Google.
- Leverage Social Media
- Ask as many people as you can to search for a different variations of the keyword, then find and click on your web page. Include branded versions of keywords as well. This turns around the attack and gives you a fighting chance with real people, hopefully triggering an opposite “Instant Navboost” signal that will buoy up your rankings. If successful additional users will start clicking on your website and start reversing the negative SEO effects imposed on you.
The Good News
The good news is that this seems to be limited in scope, but it does point to the risk that it could become more widespread if more groups figure out how to do the attack, or a similar attack.
Since this is a spam tactic, there is a good chance that this loophole will eventually be closed, but for the moment this is something to be aware of.
