Really Manipulate Google

Well…. kind of. They are running an experiment which allows you to play around with the search results by moving individual ones higher or lower in the list or even removing them completely.

Now before you decide to move your site above you competitor’s, you have to be signed in to your Google account to participate. That means you are only manipulating the search results as they are displayed to you personally.

I would imagine that Google is paying attention to the selections that participants make. Hopefully, if searchers come across some blatantly spammy pages, the individual searcher will hit the delete icon. If a particular site gets enough deletes, it will probably mean something to Google and might alert them to do a manual review on the site. After all, they want webmasters to rat out other web sites that are displaying paid links.

Shout out to Haochi from the Googlified Blog for giving the details on the Google search experiment.