Bomb Dropped on Googlebombing or George Bush No Longer a “Miserable Failure”
Before you read this post you may wonder what is (or was) Googlebombing? Technically, a “Googlebomb” refers to a prank where people attempt to cause someone else’s site to rank for an obscure, meaningless or insulting search query by pointing large amounts of links to the site with the term in the anchor text link.
So does this mean George Bush is no longer a miserable failure, according to Google it does. An amusing story for clients has now bit the dust. Googlebombing no longer works which means massive amounts of links to a page without the term linking to it on the page are no longer going to be ranked for said term. Cases in point, if you searched for the term miserable failure you were given George Bush’s bio page as the number one search result. Try it now and you will see search results talking about George Bush and fact his page used to be number one for the term miserable failure.
So finally Google has corrected a long outstanding “bug” in their search algorithm. Good for them and good for all of those ranking for term miserable failure.
Google also states this has been done without any outside or hand manipulations so it would appear a page must now have the term on it before it can rank for that term.
In other words, the anchor text in links is not longer sufficient to rank for these terms. It must be found in conjunction with on-page usage.
Read all the details in a post by Matt Cutts on Google’s Webmaster Central Blog.
Shell Harris co-founded Big Oak on January 1, 2004. In a previous career he was a print & web designer and often developed the sites he designed before focusing on his current passion for search engine optimization and Internet marketing. He is an avid researcher, SEO specialist, company mouthpiece and is always looking for the next big thing in Internet Marketing.
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