Google Drop Down Suggestions

We wanted to do some testing with Google’s drop down suggestions and see how easily they can be influenced. So we took a url that did have a website and watched when we did a few things how this could effect the Google Suggestions. We used helpmegoto.com as it’s a clean url and added it to some of the positions we advertise on behalf of clients.

Date 28/09/2010 Google.co.uk

The question is how come “helpmegoto.com scam” has now become a suggested search term? Is it because we have set up a company to scam people? Not that I’m aware of. Is it because we have competition who want to smear us? Maybe, but we never use that URL so doubt it. So how com Google has decided to put scam on the end of this url? Well we dug a bit deeper and here are a few more screenshots to show you what we found. In the top 100 results there was only 2 urls that had helpmegoto.com and scam on the same page. They were not even beside each in the same sentence or even paragraph.

Highlighted red areas show where the word scam is used.

So you can see from the results we don’t have the normal sites that set off the Google suggestions like scam.com or ripoffrepot.com that effect many other companies. These are sites are a job board and a site checker which happens to have the word scam in it.

This job post mentions if any posts are scam or spam please report

You can see from the image above the site has a flag system that includes “scam” and this is number 1 in the google results.

Macfee Site Checker

Again this page has scam mentioned on it but not in reference to helpmegoto.com being a scam.

So the following 98 results in Google do not have any mention of Scam and helpmegoto.com, so it’s clear that there is no reason to show helpmegoto.com scam in the suggestions unless people were typing it in. But here is the million dollar question, why would anyone type this in?

Conclusion

Google seems to have started to suggest “helpmegoto.com scam” because 2 sites have scam on the same page. Now that Google has suggested it, people will now click on the suggestions because of human nature to check out anything negative. This does not effect us but it is effecting 1000′s of companies around the world, and many business owners are not even aware of it. Google should remove negative suggestions like this unless they have proof to back up a company is a scam. They can not use the line they only show suggestions of what people are searching, when quite clearly this example shows why would people search this unless Google was suggesting it.