Google is now providing some relief to the many presidents and others who have been targets of Google bombs. Google bombs work when a number of people get together and decide to use link text as a weapon. I could link the word “miserable failure” to the biography page of a president for example. Search engines would then have a higher propensity to return the linked web page when people search on the term used as link text.
So for example miserable failure once returned search results to Jimmy Carter’s biography page on the White House website.
Over the past years many presidents were targets of these attacks and eventually Google decided to take action and prevent these bombs from being dropped. In my informal research it seems that the bombs have been diffused for some terms but not others. Some have surmised Google has hard-coded something into its search engines to prevent the leading search engine from being “associated” with politician bashing of any sort.
I wrote about Google Bombing about two years ago and in the article I surmised that companies would be bombing one another for their taglines. One example I gave was “ultimate driving machine” which any self-respecting car enthusiast knows refers to BMWs. At the time I wrote the article this query on Google returned a number one result of www.bmw-car-for-sale.com. Interestingly it now comes up with BMWUSA.
On a related note you may not be aware that Google banned the German version of BMW because of so-called black-hat SEO techniques – specifically the use of doorway pages. This may be the highest profile website to be banned by the search engine in fact.
So sadly, many bloggers and other politically motivated web citizens will have to find new and more interesting ways to bash their political opponents. For now anyway, bombing search engines will have no effect. Until new ways are invented, many people will have to go back to the tried and tested technique of getting at their political adversaries --- calling them unpatriotic, stupid, etc.
If you want to read more about how Google is trying to prevent bombing read this great article from Rahul Prabhakar.
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