Being an SEO expert can sometimes be very tedious and mentally draining. I’m sure many others in the industry can attest to that too, although there are some funny (in a proper SEO dork kinda way) stories that have popped up over the years that do make it all interesting:
The Gobshites Down The M62
Nothing like a century-old rivalry being thrown into the SEO game, some cheeky United fan / SEO had this show up when you type ‘Gobshites’ into Google Maps:
I think both the United & Manchester City fans in the office are happy to buy you a pint for that one, Anonymous United SEO!
Google Bombing
The victims include Tony Blair and George Bush if that’s any consolation, but this outdated practise is probably most known for the search phrase “Find Chuck Norris” in which the website NoChuckNorris.com shows up. You can read more Google bombs here.
Payday Loans From Matt Cutts
My personal #1 on the list, and around the same time I was being a low-life ‘black-hat SEO’ in the PPI industry – an anonymous SEO legend trolled Google in a way that will probably never be rivalled. Not even 5 days after the Google Payday Loans Update in 2013, a website called paydayloansfrommrcutts.blog.co.uk popped up on the front page on Google.co.uk for the term ‘Payday Loans’. For those who aren’t aware, Matt Cutts was the head of the Google webspam team at the time and had announced the crackdown on ‘black-hat tactics’. I love Matt and all, but if whoever did this ever reads this posts – I owe you a beer and you need to tell me how you did it!
French Military Victories
We can’t possibly claim to be an English SEO company without taking a shot at the French. In 2003, Toronto student Steve Lerner created and ranked an infamous landing page for the term “French military victories”. Clicking the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button for the search phrase (which takes you to the top result on page 1), you were greeted by these Google search results:
Google Scraping Update
In February 2014 Matt Cutts announced a new (and subsequently retired) tool that allowed webmasters to report if any scraped content was outranking the original in Google:
If you see a scraper URL outranking the original source of content in Google, please tell us about it: http://t.co/WohXQmI45X
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) February 27, 2014
In steps Danny:
.@mattcutts I think I have spotted one, Matt. Note the similarities in the content text: pic.twitter.com/uHux3rK57f
— dan barker (@danbarker) February 27, 2014
Lorem Ipsum
Back in 2018 a Facebook Group we’re in called SEO Signals Lab launched a competition to rank for the keyword ‘Rhinoplasty Plano’. I suspect I know the reason why this particular keyword was chosen (ahem, Alex Becker), but the long term winner of the competition (not actually the declared winner as it wasn’t done within 30 days) was a website by Kyle Roof. At around day 65, the top ranking page was a page with ‘lorem ipsum’ as the content. For those unfamiliar with the term, it is basically dummy content used to fill a space when designing a website. Below is a screenshot of the site:
Lorem Ipsum (Again!)
Probably the most impressive use of ranking Lorem Ipsum has been done by Chris Palmer. Using a Google site and entity stacking through Google Drive / AWS – his ‘Lorem Ipsum’ webpage still ranks #1 as of July 2022 for the term ‘SEO Expert New York’
And there we have it! Something that less than 0.0001% of the population cares about. We’ll keep periodically updating this post as things happen in the ever-enthralling world of SEO! If you know of any other examples worthy of this nerdy list, please let us know in the comments below!
