Meet the guy who is currently ranking #1 for “Google” and doesn’t even know | Hacker News Reader

Meet the guy who is currently ranking #1 for “Google” and doesn’t even know

medium.com

14 pointseyadnour4 comments

Here is the link on Google+ that is likely causing everything:

  <a href="https://www.google.com.eg/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=ssabereltony" target="_blank" class="d-s" tabindex="0" rel="nofollow contributor-to">google.com.eg</a>

I think the rel="contributor-to" might be affecting something as well, I didn't even know that attribute value existed. I'm not sure if you can manually set that in Google+ when setting the URL or how that value is determined.

Good catch and writeup. I'd bet this technique can be applied to other sites, so hopefully Google gets this fully understood and fixed.

Thanks for your comment, dm2. I will be looking more into this.

This is by far the most logical explanation I heard till now. I want to post an update at the end of the article with your comment so other people could weigh in. Is this OK with you?

You can send me a more in-depth explanation if you want.

Let's keep digging more into this.

You can put whatever information I have that isn't already in your article, but I'd rather you not post my username please.

So I stumbled upon this fellow Egyptian HVAC Technician who is ranking #1 on Google for the keyword "Google" when you search from any Egyptian IP. It is a country-wide ranking that drove 4.2 million views to this guy's page till now. I've been digging into this since yesterday and even called the guy to ask if he did anything to achieve this.

Read the full story on Medium and Let me know your thoughts. Also, If you have any reasonable explanation for this, please let me know… I won’t be able to go on with my life like this :)

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