An unknown Egyptian repairman has embarrassed SEO experts everywhere last week when he outranked Google in the search results for the keyword “Google” on Google Egypt.
Yes, you read that right. The Egyptian repairman Saber Al-Tony who owns a small company that repairs air conditioners in Downtown Cairo actually beat Google’s SEO system when his company’s Google + page became the top result when searching for the keyword “Google” both in English and Arabic on Google Egypt for 24 hours, beating the search result for Google’s actual website.
The plot twist here is that while businesses everywhere have SEO experts whose whole job is to work on the rank of their business in Google’s search results, Tony managed to outrank Google itself without even having a clue that he had done it and without actually intending to do it.
Talk about lucky.
Even though Tony doesn’t use the Internet very often and doesn’t have posts on his page except for a few photos of air conditioners, the Google+ page now has over a 5.7 million views.
“I didn’t do anything except create a page with the company’s name with my account on Google, then days passed and I started getting showered with calls,” Tony told independent Egyptian newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm .
The previously unknown repairman and his unintentional SEO breakthrough have now become Internet sensations, garnering the attention of so many media outlets both locally and internationally. The attention ranges from TV stations contacting the repairman for an interview to SEO experts trying to figure out how he’s done it.
It was Eyad Nour, an Egyptian entrepreneur who works in digital marketing who discovered the startling phenomenon and wrote about it on Medium . When Nour contacted Tony, he said “So people think I am the “mother company” of Google? This is great.”
Nour has since been trying to figure out how this happened. One possible explanation came from a source who asked not to be named but told Nour that it could have happened due to a Google search link for Tony’s name in Arabic that was probably unintentionally listed in his profile on Google+.
Another explanation came from SEO consultant Abdelrahman Bannora who works at Google and who reported the “error” and found out it was due to an “experimental algorithm” gone wrong.
"For now, our best guess is that Mr Saber put a google.com.eg URL in the website field on his Google+ page. Google+ adds an HTML attribute called 'contributor-to' to the website link. This attribute, in theory, tells the algorithm that this Google+ page is associated with or 'contributes to' this website," explained Nour to IBTimes UK .
Perhaps the most amusing part about this is that in addition to the many TV interview “showering” Tony, several people have actually offered to buy his Google+ page and others wanted to hire him to do their SEO according to Nour. But how is that possible when he doesn’t even know how it happened?