Years ago, I once googled my name to find someone with the same name in the UK who was a bit of a fluffy motivational speaker. I laughed, and forgot about him.
A few months later, I googled my name and all that came up were fluffy blog entries he wrote on various generic blogs. They were all slightly different. He pushed me off the front page.
Granted, I don't really care about being found online. (Just leads to too much spam, recruiters are the worst.) But, a few days later I happened to be on Google's campus and someone who tracked those things struck up a conversation with me. I politely pointed out the gimmick that the other person did.
Normally, I don't like pulling strings, but I certainly had the last laugh at that one!
Unless it was a general algorithmic change that took care of that, manually intervening in the Serps for personal favors would be completely against Google's stated rules. If possible (I have some doubts), it's probably a nice side gig for employees, since rankings are easily worth millions.
A few months later, I googled my name and all that came up were fluffy blog entries he wrote on various generic blogs. They were all slightly different. He pushed me off the front page.
Granted, I don't really care about being found online. (Just leads to too much spam, recruiters are the worst.) But, a few days later I happened to be on Google's campus and someone who tracked those things struck up a conversation with me. I politely pointed out the gimmick that the other person did.
Normally, I don't like pulling strings, but I certainly had the last laugh at that one!