Google Bombs

[John Simkin]

Google Bombs: A new strategy has been developed by political groups called google bombs. Recent victims have been George Bush, John Kerry and Silvio Berlusconi. (see recent discussion on Google search-engine jokes).

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=502

A google bomb is an attempt to influence the ranking of a given site in results returned by Google. Due to the way that Google's algorithm works, a website will be ranked higher if the sites that link to that page all use consistent text. Googlebomb is used both as a verb and a noun. For example, if a user registers many domains and all of them link to a main site with the text "... is a living legend" then searching for "living legend" on Google will return the main site higher in the ranking, even if the phrase "living legend" doesn't appear on the main site. A common means of exploiting this is through weblogs, where although the entry may disappear from the main page quickly, the short-term effects of a link can dramatically affect the ranking of a given site. Empirical results indicate that it does not take a large number of websites to achieve a Googlebomb. The effect has been achieved with only a handful of dedicated weblogs. See

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googlebomb