Googlebombing is a technique to get a website ranked #1 on a Google query for a random term. For instance “liar” and “failure” were some of the most popular along with “talentless hack”. Typing in failure would take you to the president Bush’s biography, and liar would do a similar thing for Tony Blair. It’s done by linking to a website using that search term. For instance:
<a href="http://domain.com">Failure</a>
This would tell Google to associate the word “failure” to domain.com. Since the first Googlebomb a few years ago, Google has refused to manually edit the rankings. However today, it’s all been changed with a new algorithm. Matt Cutts posted an article on Google’s blog explaining how the issue was fixed. However, he does not really go in to much detail.
The change comes because a lot of people felt Google had hard coded the results, and the opinions reflected to those of Google’s.
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.
I’m not completely convinced of the reasoning however. Above the Googlebomb results, Google had a link that said “Why these results?” which linked to this page. Clearly that should be explanation enough. I guess this will bring more relevant results though.
Obviously no algorithms are perfect, so let the attempts continue. I’m going to go on an assumption that when the link has absolutely nothing to do with the content, it’s ignored. If you make a post about someone being a failure, use a few keywords that have to do with failing, and link to Bush’s biography, there’s really no algorithm in the world that can tell.