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SEO firm Virante created a buzz among the search marketing community by manipulating Google results to list out 5 sites to spell out “you should switch to virante” vertically with their sub-domains when a search is done for five seo excuses. Don’t mind the web pages, it is not pretty but shows off a search engine manipulation technique and linkbaiting to grab your attention that has never been done or seen by SEO specialists before. Let’s review a snapshot of the results to see what we mean.

By accomplishing this feat, Virante is forever immortalized in the search engine world as the first company to ever do this on Google search results. Now back to our original question. Does Google approve of this? No, certainly not. Anything done to trick the search engines / manipulate search results is considered a taboo. The offending sites that are found participating in these practices are usually banned from the Google search engine. Since capturing the term for “five seo excuses” is comparable to the SEO contests based on nonsense phrases, Google will probably let this incident slide and simply remove the sub-domain listings within the next few days until another copycat doing the same trick comes along. Google engineers will have filters to deal with the future copycats of linkbaiting.

Amazingly this manipulation trick with five seo excuses to create the top five results list does not replicate on the other search engines, only Google. It appears that other search engines are not giving as much weight to sub-domains and their search results don’t arrange sequentially to spell out the message vertically. This ploy to game Google won’t work every time as search algorithms are constantly changing to deliver better results.

We don’t know how the trick is executed, but we appreciate the linkbait technique that has generated a good deal of discussion among webmasters. We can be sure someone is already planning to taking up 10 results and blanket the search results with their sub-domains in sequential order spelling out a bigger and better message. Until next time, that’s our story on the five seo excuses and search engine manipulation.

Update 08/26/2006: Virante’s top five seo excuses spots overtaken by the thread on DigitalPoint where some webmasters had every intention of messing with the search results. The trick only held up for 3 days after being brought to the attention of the seo community.

Update 09/04/2006: Webmasters are treating the five seo excuses as their own sandbox now. The buzz has not gone away, instead it is gaining momentum as established blogs start to feed the fire (search results increased from 250k to 330k). More intriguing is how high social networking site Flickr ranks for the term with only one image titled “five seo excuses”. Social sites are very powerful SEO tools, use wisely.