How NSLookup Accidentally Climbed Google Search Rankings

A DNS lookup tool saw its traffic double overnight. The site owner checked Google's Search Console and Cloudflare - both confirmed real visitors, not bots. Then came the best part - ad revenue doubled too.

Finding The Hidden Pattern In Analytics

The data showed something interesting. People kept looking up specific website addresses:

• BBC's website (bbc.co.uk)

• YouTube (youtube.com)

• Minecraft's site (minecraft.com)

But that wasn't all. The logs showed visits from primary school websites. Then came the key discovery: hundreds of searches for "Your school's website."

The reason? UK schools had given their students (ages 10-11) an assignment. These kids needed to find IP addresses for their schools, BBC, and YouTube.

They picked NSLookup as their DNS tool to do their homework.

Boost In Google Rankings

Later that month, NSLookup got a significant boost in Google search rankings.

The strong user engagement metrics likely contributed:

• Lower bounce rates

• Longer time on site

• High click-through rates

Google tracks this data through Chrome.

Three things made this ranking boost stick:

1. Location Spread

• Traffic came from all over the UK

• Not just one city or area

• Looked natural to Google

2. Real Usage

• Students did multiple searches

• Spent time using the tool

• Created genuine site activity

3. Quality Signals

• People stayed on the site

• Used multiple features

• Came back for more searches

Rand Fishkin's World Cup Story

The story tracks with Rand Fishkin's story where he did a famous SEO test on Click Velocity during a World Cup.

Many years ago, he instructed his large audience on Twitter while he was watching a World Cup to search for a specific keyword and click on a particular result (his own blog) which was at the bottom of Page 1 on Google.

Test #1:

• Got 228 people to click a specific search result

• Time frame: 3 hours

• Result: Moved to #1 on Google

Test #2:

• Increased to 375 clicks

• Same 3-hour window

• Same result: Hit #1 position

Other people replicated these experiments, confirming the results. Despite these findings, a Google representative later claimed that concepts like dwell time and click-through rate (CTR) were "made-up."

Years later, Rand Fishkin had the last laugh.

“In their early years, Google’s search team recognized a need for full clickstream data (every URL visited by a browser) for a large percent of web users to improve their search engine’s result quality.”

This clickstream data served as the key motivation for the creation of the Chrome browser.

Now every URL you visit in Google Chrome gets sent to Google. Now it all makes sense why Google is the best search engine in the world since Chrome has the most market share at 66.65% while #2 is Safari with only 18.09%.

Google Chrome makes Google mirror platforms like TikTok and Instagram where users get recommended content based on user engagement of the video and user intent satisfaction. In Google's case, they track the URL via Chrome and time on site.

The leaked Google documents proved something interesting: user behavior matters for rankings. Google tracks how people interact with search results. When many people use a site and stay there, Google sees this as a good sign.

But remember the page has to be good enough to retain visitors or else it will lose rankings fast.

This is one reason freemium (or completely free) tools like Riverside's Free Transcription exist in the market even if they cost a bit. Even John Rush confirmed this in an offhand comment on X which I can't find anymore so you are gonna have to take my word for it.

Basically, the freemium or free tools are to signal Google to rank the page higher than competitors. Once you remove them, you see a drop in rankings because of low dwell time.

Top Tweets of the day

1/

One-person solopreneurs rarely exist. Pieter Levels isn't one as he has a server guy he pays $2,000 per month since forever but it makes for great marketing.

The only one that I can think of is Justin Welsh who is a master at content creation using systems thinking.

Its much better to run a team as Justin can't take a 1 month vacation without hurting his business numbers even though he has already made close to ~$10m now but he has to show up every day.

2/

It only took $100 to sell an MVP for $3k. One thing Jay didn't mention in the original tweet is it was a service rather than a startup but it wouldn't make for a viral tweet.

3/

A masterclass in SEO by someone who is doing experiments across 24 products.

Rabbit Holes

1. We Sell or Else by David Ogilvy

2. Rewriting SaaS Website Headlines Using Customer Reviews by Brooks Lockett

3. How I Got 97,000 Views on LinkedIn in 2 Weeks by Robert Benson-May

What’d ya think of today’s masterpiece? Hit ‘reply’ and let me know—don’t hold back, I can take it (probably).

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