I am a Romanian. I am proud of it, despite of what the world thinks about Romanians. What people think about Romanians could be influenced by Google. Google is a voice in the world, which influence in a positive or negative way, even if we do not like it.
But let me start with the beginning.
In November 2011, someone noticed that if he typed in Google romanians are (English), romanii sunt (Romanian), les roumains sont (French), los romanos son (Spanish), i rumeni sono (Italian), rumanen sind intelligent (German) the Autocomplete gave only negative suggestions.
Trying to find out what's going on, he understood that the suggestions are determined based on a number of purely objective factors (including popularity of search terms) without human intervention. If you would like to find out more details about it, Danny Sullivan wrote a really nice article on How Google Instant's Autocomplete suggestions work.
Starting from this, one of the most well knows Romanian brands, ROM, launches a campaign to change the Romania's image on Google. They build a website: Romanians are smart (with a Romanian version on Romanii sunt destepti), where they persuade Romanians to search on Google on specific terms, so they will change the Google Autocomplete suggestions. The campaign's call to action is "Change with a click"; users get the option to search directly from the website in six languages: Romanian, English, German, French, Spanish, Italian with the final goal of changing the Romania's image on Internet:
On Youtube they uploaded a tutorial that helps users to understand why and what they are supposed to do:
At the launching date, in November, there were very few searches, and they were only on negative terms. As you can see in Insights for search the number of searches increased quickly, the positive terms having a higher volume than the negative ones.
Of course, some negative searches were still in use, probably a lot of users wanted to see how the results look like.
One month later, on December 21 st 2011, a Romanian blogger piticu.ro shows for the first time that positive suggestions started to appear next to negative ones.
On the website we can see live how many searches have been made in all languages (and different websites too). Today there have been already made on the website over 600000 searches:
- 163,779 searches for romanii sunt destepti (Romanian)
- 133,892 searches for les roumains sont intelligents (French)
- 137,782 searches for romanians are smart (English)
- 62,948 searches for rumanen sind intelligent (German)
- 79,628 searches for i rumeni sono intelligenti (Italian)
- 78,829 searches for los romanos son inteligentes (Spanish)
For some languages, the suggestions are completely changed, and only positive terms appear:
For some languages, there's still work to do. For French for example, where the positive searches appears next to the negative ones.
Google gives bad suggestions about your name or brand? With a bit of work this can be fixed.
Romanians are smart, aren't they?
I liked reading this post, and seeing how a group of people that are proud of who they are gathered together and were able to make positive changes in the search suggestions (I'm speaking to just the search suggestions themselves, not any results for those queries). It wasn't just a "let's do it to see if we can do it to figure out how Google works", but people getting together for a good reason.
Thanks for sharing this case study!
This is a fantastic post, really like it =)
The funny thing is but I still see "romanians are gypsies" in second spot after "romanians are smart" on Google Australia =(
But yeah really love this as an example of people power working together to achieve fixing up Google auto suggest.
Australia wasn't in target :); but they will probably work on it. No promises though.
I agree with Keri, it was great seeing a group work together in such a positive way!
And a great post of information. Thank you for sharing so detailed.
Ha, I just did a search for "Americans are... Fat, Dumb, Lazy" Sounds like something we need to work on.
I think starting any search with "a nationality is" in many cases implies some kind of racism, so it's likely to be followed by negative words.
Don't take Google auto complete personally, I tried it with lots of countries and got the following (I won't say which country they go with, it could be bad taste):
Rude, cruel, weird, aliens, afraid of the dark(?), racist (ironic), arrogant, white, black, ugly, cowards, strange, lazy, stupid.
I only found one positive:
Eithiopians are beautiful/so beautiful
Interesting that zenophobic search queries are apparently made so often in Google - you'd think it would just reaffirm what they already think they know and be a bit pointless, it's not as though they are typing in Why are Americans.....
Wow, that article really made me smile. Good job to all the participating romanians. I think I will write a little review to this on my german blog. Thanks to the author.
Greetings Sandro
Thanks :). If you do have other questions let me know.
Way to take initiative! A lesser SEO just would have complained how evil the system is. Also glad to see such a detailed study on Google Instant.
Using SEO super powers for good. I don't like it. I love it. You & ROM rock Gabi!
Wow, I should start this in my country! Thanks Gabi! Romanians are smart!
This article is proof enough that Romanians are smart.
Clearly Romanians are smart! Too many people rely on spammy mechanical means of using cheap labor to artificially influence the Search Suggest box. When people come up with a creative, community gathering solution, it's pure genius!
What a great post. It brings up the bias inherent in any search engine algorithm. I never even KNEW Romanians were considered stupid or gypsies, and the pride of Romania is at stake, here, people.
The fact that the Google suggest feature can be manipulated is an eye-opener for me, a non-tech SEM who relies on the SEOs on this site to provide information that I can use to market client sites and the whole reputation management issue becomes clear after reading this post.
Thumbs up. Romanians are excellent writers.
Best,
Paul
I've had a friend that dealt with something like this. Their client was having a lot of negative suggestions pop up after typing a branded search query.
He tried to use Mechanical Turk to remedy the situation and while it did temporarily knock out the negative suggestions he was banned from using Mechanical Turk (whether temporarily or permanently I'm not sure).
Lesson learned: With enough leg work put into searching for positive branded keywords, you really CAN do some effective reputation management.
And yes, Romanians are smart :)
yes - being banned from mech turk is one of the pitfalls of trying to use short-sighted tactics. The other is that an artificial attempt can potentially raise red-flags at Google if an unnatural pattern emerges. The beauty of the approach in the Romanian example is how actual marketing and social media were used to create a natural crowd-sourcing solution :-)
Interesting mechanical turk banned them. I don't think Google would like this at all if they knew about it.
You are welcome :).
I wrote it because I wanted people to know that they can make a change in Google Autocomplete suggestions. They can be an influence in what people talk about their brand. I knew that it could be possible, but I've never saw it done until now.
Credits should be given to McCann Erickson Romania for the idea and to Realitatea.net, the media partner for making it happen.
Great post - thanks for sharing! I love how they built a positive campaign around this.
We work with some clients who aren't able to build campaigns like this without being called out (think "Brand Name Scam" as a suggestion), so we have to think in different directions to get people searching. It can be tough sometimes, but it does work effectively when done at the right scale.
The thing to be careful about is Google getting wise and doing manual adjustments. They state that any attempt to manipulate autocomplete can result in a penalty, so you really have to be clever in how you go about doing this.
that's kind of correct. But who will they penalize? Romania? And how? The outcome will still be good for Romanians in this case if there was a "penalty." In other SEO tests similar to this the tester found that Google would just not display any auto complete suggestions for queries it suspected were manipulated. So the outcome would still be good for "romanians are...." because the "penalty" would be that Google would just remove all of the negative suggested searches as well as the "smart" one. Some tips to possibly keep out of the penalty box...nofollow the links to Google (consider cloaking them the way affiliate marketers often do, send them through a 302 redirect through a directory on your site which you have disallowed in robots.txt, that way Google sees them as "internal links.") Encourage users to click on a random result in the SERP. It takes a bit more effort, but that's how the results would remain long term. Eventually (I think), Google will see all of those searches didn't result in any clicks and conclude that they are manipulated queries.
There should be more collective efforts like this. Google Instant is doing a real disservice to the long-tail searcher: it reminds me of those kind of people who love to finish your sentences or thoughts for you (and are so often wrong, but even if right it's conversationally obnoxious).
Buna idee si bine scris articolul :) Intr-adevar, ni se intampla sa fim si destepti !! :D
I spent three weeks in Romania in 2010, travelling around Transylvania and staying in different hostels. "Romanians are kind", "Romanians are welcoming" and "Romanians are extremely helpful" would be my experience based on the hosts - easily some the best hosts of any European country I've stayed in - some of Europe has a lot to learn from Romania! An awesome country I'd definitely recommend visiting and like to return to. I would post a link to some photos to influence people to go but don't want to appear spammy.
And if you think people have a negative view of Romanians, don't worry about it, they're just closed-minded. Nice work anyway, I'm sure this will help change some people's minds, and it's a good example of what can be done. :)
Great post.
Am i the only one that read the entire thing in a Romanian accent?
I really enjoed reading this article, and yes this is an incredible case of the power of the Internet! It's good to see people use it in such a smart and useful way.
We love romanians!
A very clever & creative idea. Nice one Romania!
I was just inspired to type in 'Irish are..' to see what would appear, and got "The Blacks of europe", "impervious to psychoanalysis" and "racist". The first two are quotes from The Committments and The Departed! The latter is maybe not so funny..
Thanks for putting this together. I did a very similar search for "British are .." and "English are..." and both came up with th same 1st result. About time we get all media agencies on this :)
Great insights for brand reputation management..
This is a very smart move, now I'm very proud of my country. OMG this article was very funny :)))
Fan of the ingenuity. It's a campaign to counter the negative auto complete. Well done.
That's really a very amazing and creative thinking to change something which needs such a large amout of activity share from people, and most of all salute to the daring Romanians for taking such a great responsibility to change that terms...
Very good article on influencing Google auto-complete. Romanians are smart!
First, great article Gabi, and i am glad that you post it here on Seomoz community, and i want to thank them because they promote it in the official blog.
I am a Romania too, and i'm proud of that. I am so glad that this campaign had a big succes on Google on one hand and on "romanians branding" on the other hand.
Now all internet users know that we are smart, funny (not all of us, of course :) ) and other good things.
This article really hit home for me. It stems from the general assumption that Romany Gypsies and Romanians are the same. Whenever a news story portrays Romany's as Romanians it just adds to the stereotype as well as causing an increase in uneducated searches which further fans the flames of negative searches.
True. It's what we wanted to prove. Not all Romanians are gypsies, or rude, or... But Romanians are smart, definitely :).
Excellent article! Congratulations!
I'm really glad more and more Romanians are standing up and getting noticed on the web. Romanians are usually the ones that make things happen behind the scenes, but it's about time they get the recognition they deserve.
But let's not forget my friend MOGmartin who came up with a similar article last year while I was at MOZcon:
https://www.seomoz.org/blog/whoa-can-query-volume-directly-influence-rankings
Thanks a lot for sharing this post. I would be really interested to know how Martin influenced the searches. He does not give details about this. I will ask him :).
Interesting post - your campaign endeavors at changing online semantics aligned with a group of people; I remember a post some time ago when people were trying to engineer SERPs for a particular person:
https://www.seomoz.org/blog/stephen-colbert-the-greatest-living-american-a-googlebombing-campaign
As long as such campaigns are used for good, I celebrate them. I do not support 'reputation management' campaigns of questionable brands, attempting to 'game' user perception. This does show how a community influences branding. That is great news for brands with faithful followers, such as Colbert.
I like your intention but what makes this difficult is that varying cultures view "right" or "good" in different ways. Certain cultures view martydom as "right" or "correct" or "justified". They believe that their actions are correct. It drives me crazy but that's my personal prejudice getting involved. I can't imagine what Google could do to make all of their auto suggestions match what someone is really searching for, given their location, etc. It's hard for a machine to get inside the head of an individual.
This is what makes machine learning so tough! Creating an algorithm that takes these cultural factors into account is an exercise in futility in my opinion.
Google by its very nature is based on the goal of achieving a profit based on the work that they do. I can't imagine a search engine that really gets the true intention of a searcher simply by the text that they type into a search box. I'm just not sure that there is an algorithm that mimicks clarvoyance.
Thanks for sharing this post. I really like this way to mitigate stereotypes, racism, and prejudices.
And I am happy to see that its not only big corporations who have the resources to do reputation management.
Very clever, very creative way to positively shift the perceptions of Romanians. Nicely done! Thanks for sharing.
Nothing to add other than I find it remarkable how Romanian has preserved its Latin influences. "Romanii sunt" is pure Latin.
We are latin :).
Wow - that's a really amazing website, I wonder how that's affected other elements of Google's results outside the predictive search function?
Thank you Gaby for standing out and tell us about this great campaign. At the end of the day, this have nothing to do with manipulating search engine. It is just about telling the world that we exist, we are like other people on this earth, but we are not stupid, ugly, etc.
great article and and a great story to illustrate the topic!
great job on the initiative there. on a similar news, Google has been ordered to change the autocomplete news in Japan https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17510651
This is funny.
Funny but real :).
Apparently, the canadians are:
Weird
Afraid of the dark
could have been worst!
Great job on writing the post - sharing this story on SEOmoz was on my mind for some time, mostly because of the story. It's also great to see so many familiar faces here :D
Great Post!
Us Irish could do with trying this as Google isn't very nice about us either :(
Seems like Romanians have become stupid again :( Google reverted the changes people of romainans made and it's showing the old results again!!! Anybody noticed this?
Yes, you're right on google.com. On google.ro the Autocomplete suggestions are still ok.
I LOVE THIS and I love that ROM took it upon themselves to start this campaign for change! It is so amazing when businesses promote the social interests of their customers in addition to the services that keep the lights on. I'm not even Romanian, but now I want to find out more about ROM and what kind of business they do. Sometimes when you encounter a company like this - you find an excuse to do business with them, or start trying to think of people to refer them to. Romanians are smart and very beautiful!
Romanian peoples are good peoples :)
I can never think of any words to describe how awesome you guys are! Everyone can make difference we can make changes to anything and everything that is controlled by internet. Google is a volatile system SEO on the other hand finds way!
I can't believe I've missed this.Yes Romanians are really smart.This is amazing brand awareness.
Cornel
I agree with your post, and yes, we romanian are... everything as anyone else.
Love this story!
Great post! It is lovely to see that a group of Romanian people can get together and change something. I think that due to the current corrupt political system in Romanian, people have generally lost their will to get together and change things for the better...
I am Romanian too and am proud of it (proud of the history of my country, proud of the values my parents have taught me, proud of my education and proud of the major achievements of Romanian people who work abroad). Nevertheless, it saddens me when I am asked where I come from (I've been living in the UK for many years now) and when I say the word 'Romania' I can see disappointment in my interlocutor's eyes or get the usual 'Aw!'
I agree with flo2 (above) I think we need to get to the root f the problem, we need to educate people where Romania is, what Romania is like (over-heard a conversation between two people in a coffee shop and I apologize, but one of them was extremely ignorant, she was trying to convince the other one not to visit Romania because "it is a dangerous place, people shoot at one another in the streets, people get kidnapped and killed" - which is completely ridiculous, sounds more like a Wild Wild West movie to me :)) ) and what the true values of Romanian people are.
But on the other hand, I can't help but notice how media is promoting and manipulating the news and ultimately, reputations. It's so common to see a piece of news on TV on what Romanian people (my correction: gypsies with Romanian passports living in the UK) have recently done but they never praise the achievements of Romanian people working at Microsoft, in Sillicon Valley or even in the UK working on the next technological innovation or providing a solution for a major environmental issue.
So, yes, we do need to voice and promote ourselves a bit more!
Just came across this website which explains what the major differences between Romanian people and gypsies are: https://www.differencebetween.net/language/difference-between-gypsies-and-romanians/
I would add a bit more to it, but I guess it's enough to provide people with a general idea about the differences.
Well done and keep it up!
R.
Buna, Excellent post :)
Another side of this whole business can be found at https://www.razvan-antonescu.info/romanians-search-engine-spammers.html .
It is well known that you can manipulate the autocomplete for a while now https://explicitly.me/manipulating-google-suggest-results-%E2%80%93-an-alternative-theory.
IMHO this has nothing to do with "reputation management". It's just one of thoese practices that fall under the shady side of SEO. (For a SEO purist this has nothing to do with optimization. On the contrary it is pure manipulation)
But in the end, Google is the only one who can decide what is good and bad behaviour and if it is against their guidelines.
Maybe in the gray area. As it does not manipulate the search engine results, do not think they we could call it spam. But Google should answer at this question.
Seems like Romanians have become stupid again :( Google reverted the changes people of romainans made and it's showing the old results again!!! Have you noticed this?
Hi gabandrei,
Nice article. I always findout this case in search engine.
Thanks,
Great insight, great action and interesting results. Thanks for sharing.
It's great to see this article proves it is possible.
I would love to know a bit more categorically, more precisely the tipping point of how many/the ratio vs other searches etc to achieve this. Not everyone has an army of 100,000 Romananian minions at their disposal.
I would be very much interested in follow up tests etc.
I've seen it pull up negative suggestions for same sex marriage too. Unfortunantly I think a lot of searchers are just closed minded and want to hate for whatever reason. I have to admit I would have never looked this up, but I grew up with some smart romanians so there is that. It's interesting you were able to change those suggestions, but you also need the masses to do it without them you might not be able to change your brand and I wonder ultimately if Google knew you were doing this and you were a brand would they punish you for appealing to your mass audience or no? It doesn't seem so, but still it seems like some spammers could take advantage of this.
Great post. On the eCommerce side of things, Google suggest is also a great traffic tool when new products come out.
This is a fantastic post, really like it =)
The funny thing is but I still see "romanians are gypsies" in second spot after "romanians are smart" on Google Australia =(
But yeah really love this as an example of people power working together to achieve fixing up Google auto suggest.
Thanks James.
Australia wasn't in the campaign's target :), but maybe they will get some work done on google.com.au as well :).
Very interesting case study, I've checked on google.co.uk and Romanians are smart :)
Thanks for sharing.
SEOs .. do not tell me that you not wanna have access to a botnet
Hmmm... this issue does not appear to affect only Romanians. According to Google, Germans are rude, Nazis, or evil.
This is great! It's good to see a campaign like this having such an impact on Google's algorithm. It is also good to know for businesses who need help maintaining a good reputation.
I suppose Google will come up wiith an algorithm to be sure that we are not trying to manipulate the Autocomplete results. Probably already has one :).
It's easy to manipulate Google Suggest. Just run a script for one or two week on a little medium site and I got postive result with low traffic query...! In the future I will try it with more competitive query.:!
Felicitari Gabriela!
Since the English search is the most important, I think we're 50% there. I get "romanians are...":
- smart
- latin
- stupid
- gypsies
We need to remove the 4th suggestion because it is not true (it's like saying apples are oranges). The 3rd suggestion is valid sometimes. :)
You can see the power of this campaign by typing "romanians" only... then "are" or "are smart" already popup.
thanks a lot for taking time to check this :).
Nice post Gabi !
Congratz for the coverage of the subject !
Even if somehow not related:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/6161567/The-20-funniest-suggestions-from-Google-Suggest.html
.. still google suggest related.
My favorite one from Google suggest is: "why my gold fish simming upside down" :)
On the second spot, if you type "why is there a", Google will suggest among other things : "why is there a dead pakistani on my couch"
Pretty cool website, and it is interesting to see that it worked for them. I would just worry if someone did this to slander a website/business.
First of all excellent post, the idea is brilliant – I didn’t think about writing about it (I knew about the campaign as I am a Romanian myself).
About the campaign I can say I strongly disagree with it, and I’ve ignored it completely. I do not think that manipulating (a search engine) in this way adds any value to Romanians. What have they got as a result of this campaign? Are they smarter? More beautiful or Latin than they were before the campaign have started? I think they (we!) rented it instead of owning it (similar to a PPC ad vs. an organic result I’d say). This happens when you treat the result and not the root cause. What will happen in a year’s time? Would the suggestions revert back? Sooner or later it will if the cause doesn’t change.
What would happen if Romanians would start a massive tree planting campaign for example? If those 600000 searchers would plant each of them 10 trees wouldn’t it be better? I think so.
I also don’t believe that “What people think about Romanians could be influenced by Google” but pretty much the other way around.
This post made me realise that Google Suggest would be another way for Google & Co. to make some money. Wouldn’t be nice (for G) if they could insert some ads over there?
Anyway an interesting campaign and post. Hope to see more posts from fellow Romanians. Thanks.
I guess in the end of the day it could also be good from a tourism point too, if people are planning a holiday and they want to see what the local community is like, they go onto Google and do some research if they only see bad things then they may go to another country. I think in the end it is a win win for all, but that been said i am not a Romanian.
I do agree with James. For tourists, in the research they should not be influenced to search for negative phrases. I think anyway should know about what is good and be warned about what is negative.
Changing Autocomplete Suggestions does not change the search engine results. I do not see it as search engine manipulation. It could be (in an indirect way) a manipulation of searches volume. This could increase the value of the searches and bring money to PPC advertisers. In the same time, isn't what we all do in marketing? Increasing the awareness of the brands, that is followed (in a normal way) by searches?
And to answer to another question: I am smarter after this campaign :). Maybe other people as well, as they know more about Romanians than before.
It's called reputation management -.-.
And a lot of times there's no root case for things like this. I hate to say it, but it's almost like justifying racism - it might be extreme, and I'm not saying you are, but think about it. Do you think Romanians can change whether they're "ugly"? Do you think they're trying to be "scum"? I mean, cmon. This is for a good cause, because no one deserves to be called these things, especially a nation of people. Again, it's reputation management, and nothing more.