Whitehatmedia News

06/02/2007  |  The end of Google bombs?

Google bombs have become a problem for Google.

Basically, Google bombs are Internet pranks. Google heavily relies on the number and the type of links that point to a website. If many websites link with a special search term to a website then the linked site will get a top ranking on Google for that search term. You should keep in mind though that what we call "inbound links" or "back links" are not enough to get you a top ranking on Google.

Some people abused once again this behavior of Google's ranking algorithm to get web sites to the top of the search results that normally should not be there for those key phrases.

The most famous Google bomb is the miserable failure Google bomb. For several months, the official home page of George Bush was among the first results on Google for the search term "miserable failure", simply because loads of websites were linking to the official home page of George Bush by using the term “miserable failure”.

Google recently decided to do something against these Google bombs and came up with an algorithm that should minimize the effects of many Google bombs.

What does this mean to your web site?

Inbound links are very important if you want to get high rankings on Google. It is important to optimize your web pages properly so that they are relevant to specific search terms, but it is equally important to get high quality links to your web site.

A site can only get high rankings on Google if it has good inbound links in addition to good content. However, it is important that you get the right links.

If the links to your web site have an unnatural pattern then Google probably will not count these links. If you get many links with exactly the same link text in a short time period then these links might be interpreted as a Google bombing attempt and be ignored by the search engine.