Google Bombing for Fun and Profit

What's a Google Bomb?

        A Google Bomb is when a cabal of bloggers and website operators use their linking power to manipulate search engine results. It came about when Adam Mathes discovered that Google's results are based partly on the text used to link to a site. He noticed that searching Google for "internet rock star" lead to a page for musician Ben Brown even though the words "internet rock star" did not appear on that page. Why was it thus listed? Because Ben's fans almost invariably linked to him as "internet rock star Ben Brown." As John Hiler wrote when exposing Google Bombs to the world, "This article I'm writing may be about Google Bombs... but if enough sites linked to it using the phrase 'Aunt Jemima,' then this article might come up as the first search result for 'Aunt Jemima.' In other words, the linker can impact the Google Rank of the linkee."

        Google Bombing is about a number of different people on different pages linking a specific phrase to a specific page.

What's Not a Google Bomb?

        Repeating the same phrase on a single page over and over (a.k.a. "keyword stuffing") is not Google bombing and may actually be counterproductive to the effort. This sort of keyword frequency overload is considered "spamming the search engines" and can allegedly get your page pulled from the listings.

        As SearchEngineWatch.com puts it, "Search engines may also penalize pages or exclude them from the index, if they detect search engine 'spamming.' An example is when a word is repeated hundreds of times on a page, to increase the frequency and propel the page higher in the listings. Search engines watch for common spamming methods in a variety of ways...."

        "Keyword stuffing" is not Google Bombing. None of the many other ways of search engine spamming or search engine optimization are Google Bombing. Only multiple people using a specific phrase to link to a specific page is rightly called Google Bombing.

Do Google Bombs Still Work?

        Seeing it as a threat to the integrity of their listings, Google has moved to decrease the effectiveness of Google Bombing. According to GooGuide.com, "To stop Google bombing, Google now seems to check link texts with the link web site. If the link text doesn't appear in the linked site, then the link is ignored or degraded." An article titled "Google Bomb-Squad Defuses Google Bombs" claims, "The basic premise of Danny's post, to my understanding, is that a Google Bomb is only effective when one of the words within the anchor text is found on the page copy. For example, 100 pages with the keyword text 'Google Bomb' point to www.abc.com/page1.html. If the page does not contain the text 'Google' or 'Bomb' in the page copy, then the Google Bomb will be ineffective. But if one of the two keywords are present in the copy, then the Google Bomb would work. Before the Google update of July 16th, the keywords did not have to be found within the page copy to successfully rank well." (Note: The text doesn't have to be in the readable part of the page. Appearing in the HTML header's "meta keyword" tag or the title also seems to be acceptable.)

        The referenced "Danny post" claims searching on "waffles" no longer brings up the John Kerry website. That's incorrect. It still works. (Well, it did tonight when I tested it.) Go to Google, type in "waffles," and press "I'm Feeling Lucky." Hello, Senator Kerry. Other recent examples such as the "french military victories" search also continue to work. While the page resulting from "french military victories" does include the bomb term in full, Kerry's page still does not include "waffles."

        The jury is still out on what is happening, but it seems to me there is no doubt Google Bombing continues to work. If you really want to be safe, though, make sure one or more words of the bomb phrase show up on the target page.

Google Bomb Method #1: Original Recipe

        (This is based on Adam Mathes' Original Instructions.)

        Gather these ingredients:

• a target page to link to. (For instance:

  http://gideon-macleish.joeuser.com/ArticleComments.asp?AID=24606 )

• a bomb term. (I don't know... just for the sake of argument... Fred Harteis? Just to be on the safe side you probably want to make sure at least one of the words in the link term actually appears on the target page or in the meta keywords in its header. Also, you'll want a bomb term that isn't already a highly used/contested keyword. "Fred Harteis" is probably not a good choice considering all the MLM drones out there who are undoubtedly already using it. If there are 5,000 high ranking sites already using your term, you're going to have trouble cracking the top.)
• a web page to link from. (Either a blog or a free site such as those supplied by GeoCities will do.)

        1) Go to your web site and somewhere add a link to your target site with your bomb term as the link text. For example:

<a href="http://gideon-macleish.joeuser.com/ArticleComments.asp?AID=24606">Fred Harteis</a>

        2) Get your site listed with Google. If you are on a popular blog site (such as JoeUser) this will probably take care of itself.

        3) Keep your site updated. You want Google to keep your bomb link relevant. If you don't update they will eventually drop you. For this reason it is recommended that if you are Google Bombing from a blog you should not just drop the bomb once and let it scroll from your main page into the archives. Instead, place the bomb in your blog roll so it appears on every page of your blog.

Google Bomb Method #2: Extra Crispy

        (This one is not for the technically faint of heart.)

        In response to what are seen as Google's attempts to thwart the Google Bomb, a new method has been devised. This controversial technique is based on the parameter passing part of the HTTP protocol. Ostensibly, http://genenash.com/ and http://genenash.com/?foobar point to the same page. Everything after the "?" is just a parameter passed to the server. That parameter may or may not have some meaning to the final page. (In the case of http://genenash.com/?foobar it has no meaning or impact. On JoeUser the number of what article to display is always passed as a parameter.) Where it is meaningless, it's usually ignored. This Google Bomb places the bomb term into the URL as a server parameter. The whole URL then becomes the link text.

        Using the same recipe as the above technique, start your bomb term with a hyphen, and replace each space with a hyphen, so that Fred Harteis becomes -fred-harteis after translation. The hard part about this is making sure that the new link doesn't break the target web page. Add the ? and your bomb term to the URL of your target and test it out. In our example,
http://gideon-macleish.joeuser.com/ArticleComments.asp?AID=24606 already has a parameter. When this happens, instead of the question mark (which is already present) append an ampersand (&) after the last parameter, add your transmogrified bomb term, and test it out. http://gideon-macleish.joeuser.com/ArticleComments.asp?AID=24606&-fred-harteis still works just fine.

        Your HTML for this version of the Google Bomb will look like this:

<a href="http://gideon-macleish.joeuser.com/ArticleComments.asp?AID=24606&-fred-harteis">http://gideon-macleish.joeuser.com/ArticleComments.asp?AID=24606&-fred-harteis</a>

        Congratulations, you've just made a new style Google Bomb.

        Good pages to read for more info (if you haven't been following the links all along):

        Adam Mathes' Original Instructions
        Will Weblogs Blow Up The World's Favorite Search Engine?
        Google Bombs Aren't So Scary
        New Google Bombing Method Found
        Lessons From the New Google Bomb
        Avoid Spamming the Search Engines