Google Bomb Diffused
By Jason Smith, Business Development Manager, White Hat Media
It used to be the case that if a web user was to type the words miserable failure into Google they would get the biography of US President George W. Bush on the White House website as the top result. The reason for this is that Google searches more than just the contents of web pages – it also place high importance on how many in-bound links a website has pointing to it and what words that actual link say. Using specific terms (or anchor text) as hyperlinks to another website is a very power search engine marketing tool. Because of the way that Google’s algorithm works, a page will be ranked higher if the sites that link to that page use consistent anchor text.
However this search engine marketing technique has been misused by the members of the online community who Google Bomb sites to get the pages ranked highly for humorous or political intentions. A Google bomb (also referred to as a ‘link bomb’) is an internet slang term for a certain kind of attempt to influence the ranking of a given page in results returned by the Google search engine. A Google bomb is created if a large number of sites link to the page in this manner. The man behind the “miserable failure” Google bomb was George Johnston, a political activist and software programmer in Bellevue, Washington, USA.
Google has finally won its war on the miserable failure result and defused that specific Google Bomb. But the wasn’t to help Bush keep face amongst the online community, it was instead part of an overall algorithm change designed to stop such mass in-bound link pranks from working. Google said in its official blog that “by improving our analysis of the link structure of the Web” such mischief would instead “typically return commentary, discussions, and articles” about the tactic itself. Writing on the blog, Matt Cutts, who specialising in search engine marketing for Google said that Google bombs had not “been a very high priority for us.” But he added: “Over time, we’ve seen more people assume that they are Google’s opinion or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Google-bombed queries. That’s not true, and it seemed like it was worth trying to correct that misperception.”
Despite these changes by Google against using this search engine marketing tool as a means of playing pranks, some other Google bombs still exist. If you type in the words “French military victories”, the first result at the top of Google says, “Your search — French military victories — did not match any documents.” If you click on this site you will find a mock up of a Google search page asking the question “Did you mean: French military defeats.”
