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1 December 2007
Quick Links: Search Engine Optimisation
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Minutes before I started typing out this article, I decided to conduct some research on my own about the topic of this piece: Google Bomb. Picture this: I entered the phrase “French military victories” in the search box of the world’s favorite search engine Google, and hit the return key. I clicked on the harmless looking top search result, and suddenly yours truly was in for a shock! Instead of encountering a website educating me about the military history of France, a satirical website with the same format as a normal Google page was displayed on the screen. The page cheekily asked me, “Did you mean: french military defeats”. The bottom of the page also informed me that “This Parody is not sponsored or endorsed by Google”. Time for a hearty laugh? Not really, especially for major search engines like Google, who now have a harder time separating the grain from the chaff.
The latest Internet jargon that seems to have captured the fancy of the technoratis is called “Google Bomb”, also known as a “link bomb”. Google Bombing is essentially the practice of influencing the rankings of certain webpages in Google’s search results for various intentions. The term was coined in by Adam Mathes in the year 2001, after he Google Bombed his friend’s website with the keywords “talentless hack”. The introduction of bias in the search results ensures that a site is closer to the top of the result list for particular search phrases or keywords. Google Bombs are mainly pranks engineered by weblog creators and website operators to have their own or someone else’s website, score a top rank for a usually futile and obscure search query. Google Bombing is very similar to spamdexing, which is essentially the practice of modifying the HTML contents of a page to gain higher rankings or to place the page in a category in which it was not originally assigned.
Google’s ranking methodology till now was said to be immune to any kind of influence or technological malpractices. The search engine’s algorithm is unique among others because not only does it show you the results for the exact keywords entered by you, at times it also shows pages which do not have those keywords, but other pages linked to these pages contain your keywords. This means that whatever users say about a webpage is as important as the actual contents of the webpage. It is because of this rule that Google is the most effective search engine today, but there is a catch to this too. If one page has a huge number of the same kind of links with the same phrase on them, it is useless in terms of gaining a high rank. What is actually needed is an array of webpages with a specific link having the same anchor text. This action can be taken with the help of numerous people on the web who join hands to achieve their goal of making a certain ridiculous phrase rank highest in search results.
A webmaster zeroes in on a specific search phrase for which a website will have top Google ranking. Then, the webmaster links to that website with that particular phrase and requests his fellow webloggers to link to the website with the same search phrase. This triggers off a chain reaction. When his contacts link to the website, they also ask their contacts to link to that site with the same phrase. This series of action continues and one day Google, during its regular crawling on the Internet, discovers the numerous sites which link to that website with that search term and gets fooled into believing the relevancy of that search term to that website.
A Google Bomb usually works for uncommon queries because of Google’s inability to produce sufficient relevant results for those search phrases. A good example for this can be a seemingly random phrase like “more evil than Satan” which, around the year 1999, produced Microsoft’s Official Website as the top result. The bombing does not work for common queries like “mp3 players” and “Harry Potter” because of too much competetion on the web. Other sites like Yahoo!, Hot Bot and Altavista have also been prone to the bombing as they use similar algorithms as Google for page ranking. You will find the official biography of George W. Bush displayed on your screen, when you type in “miserable failure” in the Yahoo! search box.
According to Adam Mathes, here is how you can start your very own Google Bomb:
Although there are many kinds of Google Bombs that can be found all over the web, we can classified them into four main categories:
Google doesn’t seem too worried with Google Bombing and treats the practice as non-substantial as the pranks usually consider little-known phrases. There is also a common misconception surrounding the practice that Google handcodes the results for the Google Bombed queries. Also, Google is not inclined to edit the affected search results by hand and have come up with an algorithm to minimize the problem. Algorithms are the preferred way of troubleshooting at Google because computers can process data very fast and algorithms in general scale well and work in a diverse number of languages. So Google created an good algorithm to detect the Google Bombs and reduce their effect, but the scope and impact of the algorithm has been found to be very limited.
To protect your website from gtting bombed, you need to optimize your webpages for relevancy to a particular search term. It is also important to link high-quality sites to your websites in order to attract the right kind of traffic and achieve good rankings. Also, assure that your website does not have links in an unnatural pattern as Google might skip through all of these links. One sure-shot way of noticing a Google Bombing attempt is to observe if your site is getting a number of links with the same anchor text within a small time period. Focus on great content which would be valuable to the users as well as appropriate inbound links to climb up the ladder of success on Google without getting bombed!
