Google Bombs Away!
UPDATE: Google pulled the plug on this type of thing, so I guess I might as well get rid of the links I’ve got.
Creating a “Google bomb” is an attempt by webmasters to influence the rankings of certain webpages using common link text. You may or may not have known the official term for this concept, but you may have seen or at least heard of the one outlined below. It’s my favorite, and here are the steps for seeing it in action:
- Go to http://www.google.com/.
- In the search box, type miserable failure.
- Click the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button.
Pretty neat, eh? The reason this happens is because when ranking websites for indexing, Google looks at link text as well as page content. You won’t find the words “miserable” or “failure” on that page. What Google figures is that when people link things, they will use descriptive text for the link. As an example, I could say I’ve found a site with cool favicon (the little icon that appears to left of the current URL in your Firefox address bar). You won’t see the words “cool” or “favicon” anywhere on there, in fact I think the site is down right now. But it has a cool favicon, and it’s one way to describe the site. So I put it in the link text, and Google uses it (among other things) to index the site in its database.
Since Bush Jr. is a miserable failure (as a president), it makes sense to use that as the text for a link describing the page for his biography on whitehouse.gov.
If you would like to add this “Google Bomb” to your site, copy and paste the following HTML onto your site:
<a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html" title="George W. Bush is a Miserable Failure">Miserable Failure</a>If you look under the “politics” section of the sidebar, you’ll see more common ones mixed with some other interesting links. Please don’t overdo it, because you don’t want it to come across as SPAM. It’s not SPAM, it’s legitimate, because it describes the subject matter to which the text is linking.
On a related subject, AOL Search is the worst search engine ever. Their results are powered by Google, but they selectively censor the results. They have completely filtered out the most relevant result for the #1 spot, and moved a different Google Bomb that they apparently deemed “okay,” to number one. That angers me.