As an advertising company involved in marketing for more than a decade, including search engine optimisation (SEO), we can assure you there is only one way to be on top of search results and stay on top.
Staying on top of search results?
The only way to stay on top of search results is called google ads!
SEO does not guarantee you the first spot nor the first page for ever.
Why ? Because, google is always revealing new rules to penalise over optimisation and search rank manipulation. And what is SEO other than exactly that ?
Google want to know the real importance of your business, SEO, kind of fakes it by getting links from here and there. Also keep in mind that Google wants to sell Ads, and SEO is direct competition for these ads.
Hence, search engine marketing (SEM) or (SEO) do work, till the next time google have new set of rules (Penguin, Panda, etc …), and that happen frequently. This leads to sites loosing ranks all the time, and require change in SEO strategy all the time. Not a big deal if you are aware of that, and have an SEO service as a subscription, and of course if the agency taking care of your SEO is a professional company that knows what it should be done after every new update.
However, this post is about the cheaters, that cheat their way to the top by actually confusing google search!
Cheating to the top of search results!
This restaurant for example managed to trick google search (if the image is real – looks a bit fake though), it would get on top of search results when someone looks for the term Restaurant near me (which happen quite often). You will find a lot of these cheaters, people buying domains and making websites or simply naming their businesses to reflects search terms like : best dentist (insert city name), best teacher, best mechanic, and so on. It is in a way a SEO shortcut, as each time they are mentioned somewhere and a link goes to their website, they are actually building the rank.
The best example of this, is accomplished by an acquaintance of mine, you can learn about his approach in my article fake it till you make it.
Matty Mo, gave himself the name “the most famous artist”, and for years tricked google into displaying him among the most famous artists! For the record, Matty Mo art consists of buying already finished paintings, and then spraying some basic forms of logos over them.
Google algorithm is always evolving, and now with the advent of AI, it is to be expected that such loopholes won’t be able to influence the google search for much longer, or would they?