A brand can live and die on its internet reputation. And Google's search pages form a huge part of a brand's online representation. It's no wonder, then, that savvy PRs have apparently been engineering incidents with the sole purpose of manipulating search and pushing undesirable stories down the ranks.
As these deepfake examples show, on the internet not all is not as it seems. Conspiracy theories about faked incidents range from Taylor Swift to Walt Disney, and all are completely plausible (or totally wild depending on your penchant for conspiracies). So I've taken a deep dive to share my favourites below. Read on for a more in depth explanation of what exactly I'm talking about, and my list of supposedly faked incidents aka SEO conspiracy theories.
What are SEO conspiracies?
Essentially, it means burying negative stories in Google by manufacturing a story based on the same keywords.
For example, if a celebrity, say, slips on a banana skin, then coverage of the whole terribly embarrassing affair is likely to be the first result in future Google searches for "[celebrity name] + banana". So said celebrity would stage a more positive incident involving a banana skin and hopefully Google would follow suit.
Here come my favourite SEO strategy conspiracy theories.
01. Taylor Swift's Jet
You've probably heard that Taylor Swift takes a lot of private jets. So many that last year there was quite the internet storm around her carbon footprint after she topped a list of private plane use.
Googling 'Taylor Swift jet' brought up a cacophony of damning headlines that Swift's PR team were *probably* keen to erase. The next thing we knew, Swift was attending a New York Jets game. Now we know she was in the early stages of dating Kansas Chiefs player Travis Kelce (who was playing in the game), but the online stories all had headlines centred on 'Jets' rather than 'Chiefs'.
Accidental?
The gains have been undone now, as the story has been superseded by continued private jet use stories. But for a brief moment there, Taylor Swift Jet took on a very different context.
02. Boris Johnson's bus
Okay he's not quite a celebrity. But this is a good one. If you're in the UK, you'll remember the pledge made by Brexiteer Boris Johnson. Leave the EU and there would be "£350 million a week for the NHS," he claimed. And then he put it on the side of a London bus. In 2019, the dust settled on Brexit and Johnson (now Prime Minister) continued to be haunted by the claim, which was prominently on Google's search page.
A bizarre interview followed in which was quizzed on his hobbies. Quite why this question was asked in this specific BBC interview remains woolly, but I'll let it slide. Johnson asserts he enjoys "making model buses" in his spare time. Almost immediately Google was flooded with stories about the Prime Minister's wholesome hobby, and the bus pledge legacy was, intentionally or not, erased.
Now the first page of the search results are a bizarre mix of articles calling out the incident for what it was, videos of the interview itself, and images of that fateful bus. So the benefits were short lived.
03. Frozen Walt Disney
There was a rumour flying about years ago that Walt Disney was cryogenically frozen. And Google was full of it. You can see where I'm going with this.
Yup, apparently Disney chose to make Frozen to manipulate that search. Or at least chose the title with specific aims. Sound outlandish? Well, Disney enthusiasts speculate that the title doesn't follow the usual patterns for film titles, which are usually names – Moana, Sleeping Beauty, Aladdin etc. Why didn't Disney simply name the film The Snow Queen? Or Elsa?
Suspicious indeed. And this is the only one of the trio that has firmly stuck, with Frozen's enduring success still reigning high at the top of Google search.
04. Selena Gomez
It's been said that Selena Gomez was so sick of the internet's fixation on her relationship status she released a song with the title "Single Soon". This means that anyone trying to determine if the star is in a relationship or not will instead be hit with Google search about her music.
As with the other theories on this list we can't verify it, of course, but it would be savvy way of distracting internet sleuths, and it has mostly prevailed in search.
