Googlebomb 2.0

by Seth Pearce, Living Liberally

Here at Living Liberally, we want to give you all updates on the current goings on in the blogosphere and progressive movement. That's why, today, we're giving you the newest news on one of the blogosphere's most important tools: the Googlebomb. From WikiPedia.

A Google bomb (also referred to as a 'link bomb') is Internet slang for a certain kind of attempt to influence the ranking of a given page in results returned by the Google search engine, often with humorous or political intentions. Because of the way that Google's algorithm works, a page will be ranked higher if the sites that link to that page use consistent anchor text. A Google bomb is created if many sites link to the page in this manner.

For example, if I had wanted to Googlebomb, Laughing Liberally comedian Lee Camp, and associate him with a negative phrase, I would write something like "What a loser?" Where the word "loser" is linked to Lee's site Lee Camp. This would make Lee's site more likeley to come up under a google search of "loser". But we wouldn't want to do that because Lee Camp is not a loser, and is in fact a very awesome comic.

This trick was used in 2004 with George W. Bush's campaign site and the words "miserable failure." But according to WaPo's campaign blog The Trail this method of googlebombing might be done for:

That's right, the online behemoth best known for its search engine says that it has rejiggered its legendary and proprietary technology so that online efforts by bloggers to manipulate its top-secret search algorithm to create cheeky, offensive and decidedly off-message answers to searches will no longer work.

"It was fun" while it lasted, said Rick Klau, a member of the Google strategic partner development content acquisition team, at a search engine optimization training session for political bloggers in Washington, D.C., this afternoon. But, he said, "Google bombs don't work anymore."

...
That doesn't work anymore, said Klau, because the company today can spot these swarms and neutralize their effect. "We are far more perceptive when it comes to these link swarms that show up in a matter of hours or days," said Klau.

Fortunately, our good friend Chris Bowers over at Open Left has an answer:

So why haven't bloggers stopped trying to game the system? Work-arounds may be one reason. So might the increasingly sophisticated nature of today's Google bombs -- what Open Left's Chris Bowers calls a "2.0 version of the Googlebomb" -- where the goal is to influence the search rank of a slew of negative news articles about a politician rather than tie his name to a keyword.

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As Bowers explained it, "What I'm doing isn't a Google bomb." It's a much harder to detect effort "to alternately optimize John McCain" in the Google search engine rankings, by linking his name to nine mainstream new organizations's stories that raise questions about the GOP presidential contender.

So, the blogosphere triumphs over the Google once again!

John McCain, John McCain, John McCain, John McCain, John McCain