Google and other SEs could probably not imagine that some persons will do everything possible to increase their PR. I do not tell about all those artful tools and inventions advertised for years by all kinds of "gurus" &C°-s (that, tools, do good job only for themselves not for those ignoirant other bloggers that follow their advises).
Some of bloggers, desperate, decided to try with paranormal. No, they did not use turned over cups or plates to call spirits. (Do you remember those "spiritual" seances from the times of our university youth?) These bloggers are much more modern. Even if I have to affirm that the spirits called with the help of a plate were very collaborative too. Who knows, maybe modern spirits want to be treated in a modern way. In any case the bloggers I speak about decided to organize a virtual spiritual seance.
They opened a list with the blogs's ratings of one of the popular search engines, choosed one of the top 3000, I think, blogs and followed it's performances for a week. It resulted stable enough and was appropriate for the experiment.
After that, the day of the experiment was fixed.
What they did:
all the partecipants (and there were many enough even if the precise number is unknown) had to try to access to the Universal Knowledge with their mind, to think about the rating of that blog for some time (1-2 hours) wishing it to have higher place in the list.
Blogger that organized this spiritual seance noticed that rating of the experimental blog suddenly began to grow. It entered in top 2000 and continued to improve for the next 3-4-5 days. Not too much but... Imagine if the owner of the blog was one of those that control own rating every day. He could have a heart attack observing that unexpected popularity!
Some days later, I saw one of the next posts of the blogger that organized that seance. After 3-5 days of "spiritual" growth of the rating, the experimental blog felt suddenly from the top 2000 to less than 5000. I do not remember the precise number well. In any case it had very bad rating in confront to the time when it was choosen to be the object of the experiment. The blogger-organizer repented with tears the damage all they did to the poor ignorant other blogger.
Personally, I was very sceptic about this experiment and wrote to the organizer they invented not very good game. We are not able to understand the higher forces and every child knows that the thought is something material. We do not know use it properly and can create problems with it. I do not know about the object of that experiment but the organizer was very, very and very unhappy about it, because she was sure she damaged that blogger.