I no more than write the headline and I already become worried that someone will mistake this post for something other than a reflection on a nerdy Internet pasttime – “Google Bombing”. Last week after my SEO Presentation at the Atlanta Web Entrepreneurs April Meetup, I took questions from the audience and one of the questions was about the practice of Google Bombing. I was asked whether I had ever been Google Bombed.
“Google Bombing” is when a group of webmasters gets together and uses their websites to unpleasantly describe someone else’s website in a “group effort” sort of way. Using well chosen, descriptive text in hyperlinks, every webmaster uses the same phrase to link to the target website. If the evil plan succeeds, Google will return the targeted website in a top position for the chosen phrase. It’s the online version of getting your house “rolled” with TP.
The most famous example of a Google bomb was when George Bush’s biography was the top search result for the query “miserable failure”. To be fair, Michael Moore was #2, proving that any side can play. Jimmy Carter was #3. It was a spectacle of widespread manipulation of the search engines – and it was pretty funny. Google finally stepped in and did a repair job so the BBC news is now #1 for the term “miserable failure”. Now it’s fixed.
Anyway, my answer to the question was basically that I really wouldn’t know. If someone Google bombed me for the term, “curly headed bozo“, for instance, I would not be aware of this because I wouldn’t be searching for the term curly headed bozo. That’s when I spotted Rusty Zarse giggling and mumbling from his front row position. I envisioned that toad licking code magician ensuring my rise to fame with a Google Bomb of his own.
I certainly don’t condone Google bombing and wouldn’t encourage anyone to participate in Internet TP games. The fact that I wrote a fairly obcure term such as toad licking code magician and put a strong tag in a hyperlink pointing to Rusty’s site, doesn’t necessarily mean that I would be attempting to Google Boom Boom Rusty Zarse for the term, “toad licking code magician”.
Lately, Google has been turning up the heat on those who buy and sell links and want people to report websites that engage in either activity. Google bombing is the other end of the spectrum. If people can link to your site, using any word, and can potentially influence the rank of your site for that word, should the target site not be able to negate the effect of those links? That would actually be good for the websites and not just Big-G (you know I love you, G) What would a toad licking code magician think?
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