Is it possible to manipulate Google's autocomplete function to get my company listed as a suggestion?

• One of my clients has been approached by a company that claims they can get them listed in Google's autocomplete suggestion tool for specific keywords which could include the company's name.

  Is this really possible? ...if so how? And, what do you think Google thinks of this?

Answer:

Over the years we've seen many different strategies for manipulating Google's ranking and its various features. In every case, even if the schemes do actually work, they only work for a short time. The keyword here is "manipulation" – Google draws a hard line on anything they view as manipulating their rankings or any of their features. It's easy to imagine that Google would hate any service that claims they can influence their autocomplete function.

Although we can't be sure about how it might work, we suspect that it uses some form of bot to increase the popularity of the targeted keyword search. It's also possible they could use real humans in low-wage locations to log-in using proxies that spoof various locations to manually search for the targeted keywords, thereby inflating their popularity so they begin showing up in autocomplete.

But regardless of their method, we are certain that Google wouldn't like it. And, as such, we'd recommend that your client avoid signing on with any service that is clearly attempting to manipulate Google's autocomplete feature. Chances are, when Google catches up with the scheme, they'll also learn who's buying into it — and the penalty for participating could be severe.