Google Bombing to the White House
What is Google Bombing?
Google Bombing means:
- Numerous links are directed to a same URL at the same time,
- The links come from a certain keyword,
- The content of the linked URL has nothing to do with this keyword,
- The URL's ranking is climbing up sharply, sometimes reaches the top, when you search with this specific keyword.
The purpose of Google Bombing is always on prank, political aims, practicing and so on.
The realization of Google Bombing is based on two factors of search engine ranking arithmetic.
- Inbound links building is the main factor of ranking,
- Accuracy of keyword is often much more important than the quantity of links.
So when a great amount of links with a specific keyword are pointing to a certain URL, the ranking of this URL will be very high even if this URL was dealing nothing with this keyword.
The most famous Google Bombing:
No more famous bombings than the White House incident. In Oct 2003, George Johnston succeeded in calling on the people to direct links with the keyword "miserable failure" to President Bush's introduction page at http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/. Two months later, this page is ranking top when searched with "miserable failure" at Google, and for some occasions it is the same situation when searched with "failure". As we all know, there is no mention with "failure", "miserable" or "miserable failure" on this page.
Google amended arithmetic to eliminate Google Bombing:
In Jan 2007, Google had modified its arithmetic to prevent Google Bombing. As to the detailed change, Google did not explain and would not explain. After all, the arithmetic is dealing with the core of Google arithmetic.
It is all known that, link building is the important factor of Google's ranking. So we should never be noticed which links are good and which are bad.
After this modification, most of the Google Bombings disappeared. When you search "miserable failure", the URL of the White House is no longer found.
Assume there were several procedures for Google to defend Google Bombing:
- It will likely be a bombing when numerous links are pointing to a certain URL in a very short time,
- This URL has nothing to do with the keyword used,
- If the keyword is negative, the bombing maybe occurs.
It is noticeable that negative bombings have disappeared after Google's modification. But the same situations still exist with the common keywords. For example, when you search "click here" at Google, the top one is Adobe Reader's download page, http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/. You can find that there is no "click here" on this page, the reason is that there are many a lot websites are using "click here" as the keyword to direct a link to the Adobe’s site to recommend users to download Adobe Reader.
Google Bombings also happen with other search engines. Try to search "miserable failure" at Yahoo, at least so far, the White House's page has still been the champion |
RongWay Team 
