What if you could find a way to make everyone’s life a bit more difficult by making Google think that you are trying a DOS attack on it? That’s exactly what I did, not intentionally, the other day, and it is safe to say that not many people were happy with me. As I mentioned in my previous post, Google was showing advertising numbers once every ten times. So I ran over 1000 queries on Google for different search terms to get some inside information. Needless to say that I was blocked by Google and every time I searched for something, Google asked me to fill out a captcha form. But I sort of assumed that was something temporary and not on an organizational level.

The very next day I received a few tasty calls from my IT department about the script that they thought I had been running to get info from Google. Apparently they found it hard to believe that some one could put that much load on Google in a matter of minutes. Not only that, the IT team told me that Google was blocking everyone from doing searches on it without entering those dreadful curvy letters+numbers. So yes. There is such a thing as being penalized for over-searching. Of course, if Google allowed everyone to abuse it then there would be no Google.

OK. Maybe it’s not that new. But it has worked before, and it keeps working. Using forums content management systems to get a site into Google’s index is nothing new. It has been done before, and that is why Google is paying extra attention to people who are trying to game the system. What Google hasn’t done yet is penalize people who use a combo attack. So here is what I did for one of my brand new domains (age = 30 days).

I installed SMF forum on it, and added a few SEO friendly plugins to make the URLs look right. Then I added 30 short sentences as posts to it. I made sure they were keyword rich and relevant to the topic of my forum. Then I used Squidoo and Wordpress.com to create to links to the forum, and this all tool less than 30 minutes. In 48 hours, my forum was in Google’s index. The domain had never been used and was parked on 1&1 for a month, so I can’t say I had a head-start in this process. The moral of story here is Google is not perfect. There are thousands of ways that you can game the system. It won’t be long-term, and it won’t build you a business. But it’s fun to do regardless…