How I tricked Google into believing I’m Britain’s Sexiest Man

It’s official. I have beaten David Beckham, Robert Pattinson and David Gandy to become the “Sexiest Man in Britain” with this picture.

Don’t believe me? Google it yourself:

Tom Church: How I tricked Google into thinking I am Britain’s sexiest man

In this article I will show you how exactly I got to the top of Google to be Britain’s sexiest man.

By doing so I hope to raise awareness of false beauty standards promoted on search engines.

Keep reading for the exact method and resources I used.

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This article got a LOT of press coverage

[Update] Since publishing this step-by-step methodology on how I beat Google to become Britain’s sexiest man, it appears I also broke the internet:

• Daily Mail
• Lad Bible
• Digital Spy
• Daily Star
• Mirror
• Metro
• Gizmodo
• Capital FM
• Lost At E Minor
• Shortlist

Step 1: Choose your search phrase

Over a million people a month search for “Britain’s sexiest man”, “sexiest man in Britain” and other related phrases on Google.

Furthermore, a friend had shown me how when you search Google images for ‘beautiful woman’ only photoshopped women all of whom look very similar, in lingerie and mostly white come up. Search engines are indirectly promoting false beauty standards and I wanted to raise awareness of this fact.

Google image results for “beautiful woman”… Not exactly natural.

Step 2: Find an image and change the filename to your search term

Find a relevant picture (or not, could be random I suppose) and change the filename to your search term. The method I’m going to show you uses images to rank highly on Google.

Step 3: Upload your image to multiple free image hosting websites

Upload your photo to as many free image hosting websites as you can find. Here are a few examples of the ones I used:

• Day Views
• 500px
• ipernity

List of other image hosting sites

• Flickr
• Fotki
• Fotolog
• Instagram
• ImageShack
• Imgur
• jAlbum
• Photobucket
• Pinterest
• Pixabay
• TinyPic

Step 4: Optimise the images with the search phrase

When you upload the image to the various free image hosting sites, you should be able to choose a title, description, caption, alternative description and even tags. Take advantage of all of these opportunities to put your chosen keyword in there. Make sure the search phrase you want to rank highly for is everywhere you possibly can.

Step 5. Tell Google to come and index it: Pingler

Image showing Pingler in motion

Use Pinger to tell Google to come and index the images. Copy and paste the URL of where your image is hosted into Pingler, give it a title and category, then hit ‘submit’.

Make sure you keep the window open for a while for Pingler will whirl through a bunch of things pinging various Google services.

Step 6: Sit back and wait

Create a Google Alert for your chosen search phrase and sit back and wait for your pictures to start ranking in the Google results. It may not take any time at all, for example, I got my first picture indexed in an incredible 11 minutes, but some others took days and even weeks.

You can give them a helping hand by building links to them from other websites.

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Results: Britain’s Sexiest Man

When people search for the “sexiest man in Britain” in quote marks I now come up for three of the top 10 search results. That’s not bad for just uploading a photo to a few free places.

Instead of getting the usual Robert Pattinson, David Gandy, or Golden Balls, people now get me 🙂

Tom Church, Britain’s sexiest man, listed above Robert Patterson

Using this for good

Wouldn’t it be great if for every time someone searches for a stereotypical image of beauty, a picture of something random like a cat came up? Try my method of climbing Google rankings by using cute pictures to replace those you don’t like.

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