To infinity and beyond! This is how your social signals in Google+ could be raised.
Maybe I'm not yet at the level of Buzz Lightyear, the +1 button of my page still doesn't show an infinite value, but with a few millions I think I'm on the right track. Definitely it is a way to increase +1s faster (much faster) than the one explained in
How +1 works on the sites.
This time the discovery is not mine but it's by
Demetrio Siragusa on his
FabLab Palermo page connected to the
FabLab Palermo site. A few days ago, Demetrio, with considerable surprise,
found the +1 counter increased to over 5 million, despite the followers are little more than a hundred. From the analysis of both the site and the page,
Enrico Altavilla has discovered that the phenomenon is caused by a bug. The whole story can be read on
How to get ten millions +1s in a week written by
Martino Mosna.
From the discussion with
Enrico Altavilla and
Martino Mosna 6 + 1 tests were born to verify the assumptions we made and to try to understand in which ways the bug could work. A test was done on
FabLab Palermo, which got over 10 million +1s, as you can see on the image below
The bug
It takes a few minutes to replicate the bug, and you need two things:
- a Google+ page with a linked website
- making the Google crawler believe that on the linked web site there is a redirect (in various forms) to a site with millions of +1
A page on Google + can have a linked site that appears below the avatar and the name of the page. This site can be verified, and in this case a checkmark will appear next to the address as below:
There are two ways to link a site: you can be its webmaster in Google Webmaster Tools and approve the linking, or you can insert
rel = publisher relationship in its HTML code. Each of the two procedures requires that the owner of the page is also the owner/webmaster of the site.
This prevents people to verify someone else's web sites.
6 Google+ pages were created for the test and each one of these has been linked to a different url on ideativi.it. To accelerate the timing each page has been submitted to Google through the
Fetch as Google feature of Google Webmaster Tools. Each of the 6 URLS has a different HTML code, created with
the goal of making Google believe that the page is a non-canonical version of a different page (in this case the Google homepage).
Test 1
This test uses the same HTML code that
Demetrio Siragusa had on this web site:
<iframe src="http://www.ideativi.it/" width=100% height=100% frameborder="0">
<script language="javascript">
<!--
location.replace("http://www.google.com");
-->
</script>
</iframe>
The code is trivial.
It's an iframe that points to a page and inside it there is a script that runs on browsers that don't support iframes. The script, if executed, redirects a client to the Google homepage. This code has fooled Google, because the search engine doens’t undestand that it runs only on prehistoric browsers. So, Google considers it as a real redirect but this is not the cause of the bug.
The bug is that Google verifies that the URL linked to the Google+ page belongs to me but they do not verify the ownership of the final URL where the redirect points. That’s why in two days after the creation of the Google+ page it got all the +1s of www.google.com.
Actually, it surprised me very much, even if it should have not, given the presence of some prior events like
How I Hijacked Rand Fishkin’s Blog and
How Webmasters Fake Their Google PR.
EDIT 25/03/2014: This hack doesn't work anymore. Google fixed it. To date tests 3, 4, 5 still work.
Test 2
The second test uses
a canonical tag directed to the Google homepage
It didn't work.
Test 3
In this test I used a
meta refresh to redirect to the Google homepage
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=http://www.google.com/">
The linked Google+ page got, in a couple of days, millions of +1.
Test 4
This test implements a
302 redirection to the Google homepage.
The linked Google+ page got, in a couple of days, millions of +1.
Test 5
This test implements a
301 redirection to the Google homepage.
The linked Google+ page got, in a couple of days, millions of +1.
Test 6
This test implements a
rel=publisher directed to the Google homepage.
It didn't work.
A second bug?
A few days ago
+CircleCount published the list of the Google+ pages with the highest count of +1s:
In this list
we find some unusual pages with millions of +1 and just a few followers, like
+YouTube Next Programs,
+Virtual Photo Walks Korea,
+Google Local Tokyo,
+Google Local London,
+Google Local Austin,
+Google Local New York,
+Google Local Sydney,
+Google Local DC,
+Google Local San Francisco. In this case I do not have a suitable page to test with but the analysis of these pages gives me at least a hypothesis.
They are all verified pages and all but one have a linked site. I think that,
for verified pages, Google could automatically accept any cited URL as the linked one. So basically, if the page is verified, Google+ takes as verified any inserted link. This is why
+YouTube Next Programs has the same number of +1s of YouTube with only 133 follower. And that's why all the above cited Google Local pages have almost the same numer of +1s.
Don't be too excited
You can increase the value of +1s of a page to millions in just a couple of minutes. And you can also add
cloaking to any of these methods, making users unaware of these tricks. In any case, I advise against using these methods. I won't use them in any of my sites. Social signals are ignored by Google, as their representatives stressed more than one time. Also,
it is a bug, an unwanted behavior and Google will probably fix soon. It wouldn't be nice to see the counter on your page falling from millions back to hundreds. As they say: from riches to rags.
Credits