Googlebombing

Now we know the term “bomb” and “bombing” have become quite scary these days, especially with the ever-present threat of terrorism. Hey, it’s September, after all, and we know this isn’t a very good month as many people have been directly and indirectly affected by terrorist acts a few years ago. And also think of how this has inconvenienced us. Has anyone tried to travel by air lately?

However, the “bomb” we’ll be talking about today is of a different kind. Googlebombing is in essence a search-engine optimization (SEO) tactic that people use to discredit an enemy online. The idea is to build up enough links to one certain website using a certain keyword, so that Google will pick up on that keyword as the definitive description to use for the intended site.

The most popular Googlebombing exploit is probably the “miserable failure” and actually even the word “failure” itself.

See for yourself.

You get George W. Bush’s biography as the first result. And when a user clicks “I’m feeling lucky” instead of the usual “search” button, he is automatically directed there.

Apparently, Google has already included a warning that the result might be politically-oriented. Still, this means there could be thousands of other sites that have been similarly Google bombed.

Also, if you check out the search results for “liar” guess who comes up on top:

There’s no “political” warning here, though. We wonder why.

The principles behind it

It’s basically an SEO tactic done in-reverse. SEOs would normally want their site to rank on top in their desired keywords. So they do both onsite and off-site optimizations, with the latter being a link buildup from external sources. However, with Googlebombing, the “bombers” want someone else’s site to be number one for a negative or derogatory keyword instead of a positive one.

Since you cannot possibly do the on-site optimizations with a third-party site, the key here is off-site optimization. This means you have to link to that particular site as much as possible–and from sites of high pagerank as possible–using the desired keyword as your anchor text.

So, if, for instance, you want to Googlebomb the site www.something.com as “ugly” then you link to that site from as many other sites as possible using “ugly” as anchor text, or basically the following:

<a href=”http://something.com”>ugly</a>

Wait a few weeks, and see your Googlebomb climb up the SERPs. Of course, the victim might also do his own counter-campaign or counter-Googlebomb, and this is by using the same anchor keyword to bomb some other site (or perhaps your site).

Of course, we don’t condone Googlebombing, particularly for political purposes. But hey, it could be fun! You can do a lot of naughty (and hopefully harmless) things with this.