No more Googlebombing

January 29th, 2007

Googlebombing. A collaborative effort by users to influence the search engine results pages by giving a page a vast amount of incoming links, with certain anchor text. One of the most famous Googlebombs was getting George. W Bush’s biography on the official Whitehouse site to the top of Google for the search “Miserable Failure”, (even “failure” for that matter). A post on the Google Webmaster Central post entitled “a quick word about Googlebombs” suggests that Google is now on top of the problem and Googlebombs should no longer have the impact they once did.

How does this work? Google seems very protective about giving away it’s secret sauce and letting us know, algorithmically how this change works. One user speculated:

…if the target URL has tons of off-page optimization for a certain keyphrase, but very little (or no) on-page optimization for that same phrase, then it might fit the signature of a GoogleBomb.

Which Matt Cutts seems to hint that he’s on the right lines. I imagine the truth is this is only the tip of a very large, complicated iceberg.