The story of how easy it really is to trick a search engine and big sites to promote your personal brand.
Honest SEOs improve the site, adjust to the requirements of search engines, listen to the advice of Google representatives in order to reach the top of the results, but the result is not always successful. It is a shame when the search engine ignores the efforts of those who play by the rules, but has no problem promoting manipulators.
In this article on my blog about Affiliate programs I will tell you about the schemes by which people managed to cheat Google, Instagram, IMDB, Spotify, Apple Music and other sites. We do not approve of dishonest ways of promotion, but we admit that it is very entertaining.
We share the algorithms, but advise not to repeat them.
HOW TO CHEAT GOOGLE AND BECOME A TOP ACTOR BY SIPPING JUICE ON YOUR BLOCK
Blogger Pea Bee sat on the IMDB website and read about the Indian film “Animal,” due out in 2023. Under “Top cast” among the famous actors he saw a certain Subhankar Bagchi he had never heard of.
The list looked strange: one of the highest paid actors in India, Ranbir Kapoor, one of the most famous actors in Indian cinema, Anil Kapoor, award winner Rashmika Mandanna… and some Subhankar Bagchi.
Top action-drama cast.
The actor information page on IMDB said that Subhankar Bagchi is a singer, Youtube blogger and actor born in 2002 with an impressive list of films, including big-budget ones.
The actor’s fill-in-the-blank page.
If you google him, a knowledge panel comes up that lists him as a musician with brief information, links to social media and music profiles on various services. The tracks are just mixes of existing music without words, layered on top of each other in a sound editor.
The output when Pea Bee made the request.
On Youtube and other social media, Subhankar has fairly few subscribers.
Actor info and filmography.
The blogger started digging further and realized that there is a whole scheme by which young Indians from small towns create a fake media identity for themselves.
He found several dozen similar profiles on IMDb. For example, on the “KGF: Chapter 2” movie page, the marked actor profiles are fake, which the blogger was able to verify. Several more are listed in the sound or music department, production management and others.
And that’s just in one movie.
Most of these guys have things in common: Being part of the cast or crew of a lot of high-budget Indian films. Their roles are not listed, but often nobody’s roles are signed on the movie page at all.
Young people in their 20s and 30s, mostly from small northern Indian towns. Musicians or youtubers with tracks uploaded to major music platforms. There are profiles on the same websites with biographies written in copy-paste. And they all have their own Google knowledge panel.
HOT TO CHEAT GOOGLE’S ALGORITHMS AND GET A KNOWLEDGE PANEL
A scheme by which young people were able to outsmart the search engine:
1. Created a profile on various music platforms.
2. They uploaded simple tracks there, glued together from ready-made music in a simple editor, so that no one would have any claim to copyrights.
3. Create profiles on sites that do not moderate user-generated material.
For example, on Issuewire, anyone can submit a press release, which is sent out to other news platforms and ends up in Google’s index. The site lets you post one release for free, so all the fake actors a blogger has got it. At filmfreeway.com, filmmakers can submit films to film festivals around the world, but the site has hundreds of profiles of young Indian men who are only associated with movies as viewers.
4. Made a page on IMDb and put yourself in the cast or crew. The site allows all users to add and edit pages model like Wikipedia, and you can’t see the history of edits there either.
All this is to make Google algorithms believe that they are outstanding people.
The sites listed have no moderation, but they have high SEO rankings and Google trusts them. It analyzes information from various online sources and compiles it into a knowledge panel. So a simple Indian guy ends up with his own card at the top of the list from desktops and mobile.
Why they need it is unclear, given that these young people are not promoting their own music or other creativity. Probably to peck chicks The blogger found similar profiles of musicians from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal apparently, this scheme is known in some circles in South Asia.
A young blogger was found on YouTube explaining in Bengali how to get a Google knowledge panel. In one of the videos, he mentioned that someone charges more than 2,500 rupees for such a service.
Schemes to cheat algorithms are to manipulate output results and mislead users.
It makes you feel uncomfortable that it’s so easy to cheat Google without spending a penny. But Google is not the only place where people can be something they are not.
