Organic CTR manipulation

Organic CTR ("Click-through rate") manipulation is a search engine optimization (SEO) technique where webmasters generate fake clicks towards their own websites to trick the search engine into thinking the website is more popular than it is.

History

In 2014, Rand Fishkin, founder of Moz, conducted a case-study with his Twitter audience. At 6:03 PM, his target website ranked 7th for the target search phrase. He tweeted out to his audience, asking for his followers to search the specific keyword and click to his website, which then sat at position 7. By 9:01 PM, his website ranked in the first position. Follow-up tests were run by other industry including experts like "How To Use Click Through Rate Manipulation". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bG7ThJ2IlUA&t.  Chris Palmer, Mark Flanighan and Dan Petrovic.

Manipulation

Black hat SEO’s have adopted many techniques to manipulate this new found ranking factor. Leading SEO experts utilizing CTR manipulation to achieve fast results but still needing high quality pages to retain the new achieved result.

Software generated clicks

The first of software to appear were generating fake, automated clicks. Some examples are: SearchSEO.io, SERPEmpire.com, CrowdSearch.me and PandaBot.net. These automated strategies were critiqued among the black hat community.

Incentivized clicks

Another strategy marketers use to combat the faults in automated clicks is incentivizing real people to make the clicks. This resulted in the rise of get paid to websites where users could earn money by searching and manipulating the CTR for a webmaster. This strategy is more costly as the clickers must be individually paid. Some examples of this service are: SerpClix, MTurk, MicroWorkers.

See also

• Cloaking
• Content farm
• Doorway pages
• Scraper site
• Spamdexing