The Google Bomb Lives – Link Building
The Google Bomb Lives – Link Building – Search Engine Optimization
Just how powerful is putting keywords in links? Well, lets discuss the Google bomb.
I’m going to show you a couple pages that rank very well for keywords that don’t even appear in the pages. How could that be possible? It’s all in the power of linking. First search Yahoo! And MSN Live Search for the term miserable failure. The page that appears first (at least at the time of writing 11-09-08) in both cases is www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html, George Bush’s bio page on the White House Web Site.
This was done by a small group of people using links in blog pages. Despite the fact that this page contains neither miserable, nor failure, and certainly not miserable failure, a few dozen links with the words miserable failure in the link text were enough to trick the major search engines.
This is known as a Googlebomb, and in fact, it used to work on Google, too, until Google bowed to criticism (after a couple of years) and changed some things to ensure to ensure that the President’s page no longer appeared in the search results. But Yahoo! And MSN/Live Search did not make this change – this particular Googlebomb, paradoxically, only works on Yahoo! And MSN/Live.
I’m not sure what Google did to remove the George Bush result. They say that they “came up with an algorithm that minimizes the impact of many Googlebombs.” Nevertheless, they didn’t completely throw out the concept of using keywords in links to tell them what the site is about. In fact their statement suggests just that. They “minimized” the impact of “many Googlebombs;” they didn’t completely stop them.
They most likely applied an algorithm that says something like, “If we see x number of links of type y pointing to the site using keywords that don’t appear in the site, then ignore the links.”
In any case though the fact is the basic principle behind Google bombing remains valid: putting keywords in links tells search engines what a referenced site is about, and the more links with keywords the better.
I often have clients ask me why a competitor ranks so well, also stating, “Their pages aren’t better optimized? Is it because it has more content? Because the content is better optimized? Because the site has more incoming links? The last of these factors is often essential; when I do a link analysis I often discover that the poorly optimized, yet highly ranked, site has a huge number of incoming links, with just the right keywords.
**TIP** Here’s the ideal combination for links and the pages they point to: The keywords in the link match the keywords for which the referenced page is optimized.
Link to this page
