What's a Google Bomb?
A Google Bomb is
when a cabal of bloggers and website operators use their linking
power to manipulate search engine results. It came about when
Adam Mathes discovered
that Google's results are based partly on the text used to link to a
site. He noticed that searching Google for "internet rock star" lead
to a page for musician Ben
Brown even though the words "internet rock star" did not appear
on that page. Why was it thus listed? Because Ben's fans almost
invariably linked to him as "internet rock star Ben Brown." As
John Hiler wrote when exposing Google Bombs to the world, "This
article I'm writing may be about Google Bombs... but if enough sites
linked to it using the phrase 'Aunt Jemima,' then this article might
come up as the first search result for 'Aunt Jemima.' In other words,
the linker can impact the Google Rank of the linkee."
Google Bombing is
about a number of different people on different pages
linking a specific phrase to a specific page.
What's Not a Google Bomb?
Repeating the same
phrase on a single page over and over (a.k.a. "keyword stuffing") is
not Google bombing and may actually be counterproductive to
the effort. This sort of keyword frequency overload is considered
"spamming
the search engines" and can allegedly get your page pulled from
the listings.
As SearchEngineWatch.com
puts it, "Search engines may also penalize pages or exclude them
from the index, if they detect search engine 'spamming.' An example
is when a word is repeated hundreds of times on a page, to increase
the frequency and propel the page higher in the listings. Search
engines watch for common spamming methods in a variety of ways...."
"Keyword stuffing"
is not Google Bombing. None
of the many other ways of search engine spamming or search engine
optimization are Google Bombing. Only multiple people using a
specific phrase to link to a specific page is rightly
called Google Bombing.
Do Google Bombs Still Work?
Seeing it as a
threat to the integrity of their listings, Google has moved
to decrease the effectiveness of Google Bombing. According to
GooGuide.com,
"To stop Google bombing, Google now seems to check link texts with
the link web site. If the link text doesn't appear in the linked
site, then the link is ignored or degraded." An article titled
"Google
Bomb-Squad Defuses Google Bombs" claims, "The basic premise of
Danny's post, to my understanding, is that a Google Bomb is only
effective when one of the words within the anchor text is found on
the page copy. For example, 100 pages with the keyword text 'Google
Bomb' point to www.abc.com/page1.html. If the page does not contain
the text 'Google' or 'Bomb' in the page copy, then the Google Bomb
will be ineffective. But if one of the two keywords are present in
the copy, then the Google Bomb would work. Before the Google update
of July 16th, the keywords did not have to be found within the page
copy to successfully rank well." (Note: The text doesn't have to be
in the readable part of the page. Appearing in the HTML header's
"meta keyword" tag or the title also seems to be acceptable.)
The referenced
"Danny
post" claims searching on "waffles"
no longer brings up the John Kerry website. That's incorrect. It
still works. (Well, it did tonight when I tested it.) Go to Google,
type in "waffles," and press "I'm Feeling Lucky." Hello, Senator
Kerry. Other recent examples such as the "french
military victories" search also continue to work. While the page
resulting from "french
military victories" does include the bomb term in full,
Kerry's page still does not include "waffles."
The jury is still
out on what is happening, but it seems to me there is no doubt Google
Bombing continues to work. If you really want to be safe, though,
make sure one or more words of the bomb phrase show up on the target
page.
Google Bomb Method #1: Original Recipe
(This is based on
Adam Mathes' Original
Instructions.)
Gather these
ingredients:
1) Go to your web
site and somewhere add a link to your target site with your bomb term
as the link text. For example:
<a
href="http://gideon-macleish.joeuser.com/ArticleComments.asp?AID=24606">Fred
Harteis</a>
2) Get
your site listed with Google. If you are on a popular blog site
(such as JoeUser) this will probably take care of itself.
3) Keep your site
updated. You want Google to keep your bomb link relevant. If you
don't update they will eventually drop you. For this reason it is
recommended that if you are Google Bombing from a blog you should not
just drop the bomb once and let it scroll from your main page into
the archives. Instead, place the bomb in your blog roll so it appears
on every page of your blog.
Google Bomb Method #2: Extra Crispy
(This one is not
for the technically faint of heart.)
In response to
what are seen as Google's attempts to thwart the Google Bomb, a
new method
has been devised. This controversial
technique is based on the parameter passing part of the HTTP
protocol. Ostensibly, http://genenash.com/
and http://genenash.com/?foobar
point to the same page. Everything after the "?" is just a parameter
passed to the server. That parameter may or may not have some meaning
to the final page. (In the case of http://genenash.com/?foobar
it has no meaning or impact. On JoeUser the number of what article to
display is always passed as a parameter.) Where it is meaningless,
it's usually ignored. This Google Bomb places the bomb term into the
URL as a server parameter. The whole URL then becomes the link
text.
Using the same
recipe as the above technique, start your bomb term with a hyphen,
and replace each space with a hyphen, so that Fred
Harteis becomes -fred-harteis
after translation. The hard part about this is making sure that the
new link doesn't break the target web page. Add the ? and your bomb
term to the URL of your target and test it out. In our example,
http://gideon-macleish.joeuser.com/ArticleComments.asp?AID=24606
already has a parameter. When this happens, instead of the question
mark (which is already present) append an ampersand (&) after the
last parameter, add your transmogrified bomb term, and test it out.
http://gideon-macleish.joeuser.com/ArticleComments.asp?AID=24606&-fred-harteis
still works just fine.
Your HTML for this
version of the Google Bomb will look like this:
<a
href="http://gideon-macleish.joeuser.com/ArticleComments.asp?AID=24606&-fred-harteis">http://gideon-macleish.joeuser.com/ArticleComments.asp?AID=24606&-fred-harteis</a>
Congratulations,
you've just made a new style Google Bomb.
Good pages to read
for more info (if you haven't been following the links all along):
Adam
Mathes' Original Instructions
Will
Weblogs Blow Up The World's Favorite Search Engine?
Google
Bombs Aren't So Scary
New
Google Bombing Method Found
Lessons
From the New Google Bomb
Avoid
Spamming the Search Engines