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Google bomb (googlebomb or linkbomb) is a name of a process of manipulating search engine results through “bombing” Google search engine with links with certain anchor text to one website within short period of time. As Google uses anchor text to determine the relevancy for keyword or key phrase, a website may rank higher for the keywords in the anchor text if there are many links with the same anchor text on many different websites.

A google bomb is created if many websites link to one website with the same anchor text within short period of time. That way it is possible to link a certain website with any chosen keyword. Thats why many previous google bombs have been created with humorous or political intentions.

For example, a “miserable failure” key phrase used to show the biography of George W. Bush at white house website on the first place for this keyword in Google search engine.

Click on image to enlarge. Image by Wikipedia.

How to create a google bomb?

A significant number of people have to link to selected website with the same anchor text within short period of time.

But isn’t it called SEO?

SEO is about bringing a website for desired keywords higher in search result pages, so you may think that this is a legitimate technique to use. But google bomb is a special form of SEO-kind of process. Its aim is not to promote good products or services. It aim is to make fun or defame a person or an organization. And that is a bad thing to do.

What Google has to say

At first Google did nothing claiming they do not want to interfere with the results:

We don’t condone the practice of googlebombing, or any other action that seeks to affect the integrity of our search results, but we’re also reluctant to alter our results by hand in order to prevent such items from showing up. Pranks like this may be distracting to some, but they don’t affect the overall quality of our search service, whose objectivity, as always, remains the core of our mission - Google blog.

In 2007 they changed their algorithms:

We wanted to give a quick update about “Googlebombs.” By improving our analysis of the link structure of the web, Google has begun minimizing the impact of many Googlebombs. Now we will typically return commentary, discussions, and articles about the Googlebombs instead.

Because these pranks are normally for phrases that are well off the beaten path, they haven’t been a very high priority for us. But over time, we’ve seen more people assume that they are Google’s opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Googlebombed queries. That’s not true, and it seemed like it was worth trying to correct that misperception. So a few of us who work here got together and came up with an algorithm that minimizes the impact of many Googlebombs - Google blog.

Conclusion

It was fun for some time to hear from time to time about new googlebomb (not only in english language, there have been numerous googlebombs in different languages as well), but it got serious after while and it started to be used in a commercial googlebombing, for political issues and so on. It stopped being funny and it started to be a problem. And thats why now if you try to perform a googlebomb it will probably “fail”