My Sister’s an Asshole: How We Used Social Media to Snark Our Way to the Top of Google

How do I know that social media affects Google’s search results? Funny story…

This is my sister.

She has a blog.

It’s about Disney stuff, but is in no way as family friendly as the source material (or is it?).

So one day she writes a blog entitled “Disney’s Biggest Assholes“. It’s clever, we have a few laughs and move on. Until a few days later when I notice referrals from Google for the keyword “biggest asshole”.

Back in the glorious days of keyword referral data.

Well that’s interesting. So I head over to Google and sure enough, there she is at the bottom of page 1. We have Google Authorship set up, so as a special added bonus, her picture shows up too!

Yet another cool thing Google has stolen from us.

So now I get to go call my sister with the greatest statement ever:

“If you Google ‘biggest asshole’ your picture shows up.”

Having the sense of humor my sister has (slightly sadistic) and the odd things about which she chooses to be competitive, this will not stand. She must be Google’s biggest asshole.

So we schemed.

She took to her Twitter account with a hashtag campaign listing reasons that she was deserving of Google’s top ranking.

These tweets got 75% more impressions and almost twice as much engagement as her average tweet. But overall, it did not drive significantly more traffic to that article. The article also has approximately the same number of backlinks as the average post on the site. All of the buzz stayed in the social media-verse.

This was also not a case of a particularly influential Twitter account showing up on Google’s radar. At the time she only had a following of about 300. This was a modest account engaging with other modest accounts.

But despite the small following and no backlinks, two weeks later she was number one, ranking ahead of much more authoritative sites like Reddit and Cracked. Since she stopped with her Twitter campaign she has fallen back to page 2, and Google recently did away with Authorship pictures in the results, so our fun was unfortunately short-lived.

P.S. My sister likes to refer to this as her “supervillain origin story.” Our mother must be so proud.