10 Websites That Tried to Fool Google (And Failed)

SEOs have been trying to outsmart Google for as long as it has existed. Sometimes, they win; other times, their attempts fail.

Here are 10 extraordinary examples of websites that failed to fool Google.

Key stats

• 2,794,551 keywords ranking, August 2022
• 255,527 pages, August 2022
• Estimated traffic: 3.6M, August 2022

Conch House is a review site that ranked for over 250,000 “best+[product]” keywords and acquired 14,000 number #1 rankings.

This huge rise in organic traffic meant the website became notorious in certain SEO circles.

We can see there is some serious money at play here, and this didn’t go unnoticed on SEO Twitter.

How did it fool Google?

It used an authoritative expired domain and created content targeting “best +[product]” keywords.

It also used dynamically created pricing tables on its landing pages to encourage visitors to click through to Amazon and maximize its income. If a user bought a product, it would earn an affiliate commission.

Shockingly, for a few months, this setup was good enough to fool Google.

Let’s take a closer look at what happened.

Content

There was speculation that the site used AI to create its content, but it might have been much simpler thanthat.

It might have used concatenation to stitch sentences together and insert product titles to slightly differentiate eachpost.

Take a look at some of itsposts:

From the website, you can see several stock phrases it used to build content at scale quickly.

Examples:

• “Are you looking for the...