Okay, we recently wrote about someone who stands the chance of getting Googlebombed pretty soon. While we don’t condone Googlebombing (the fun activity that it is!), there are some things in life you cannot control. And one day you might just discover yourself to be the victim of such a prank.

Google itself won’t manipulate the rankings, though, as this would only tarnish Google’s reputation as being impartial and fully-automated. So it’s up to you to fight back.

Here’s what you can do to at least minimize the potentially embarrassing effect of being Googlebombed: use referrer redirection! Simply put, this will tell your server to redirect all queries coming from Google using the concerned keyword to another site. So if someone Googlebombs you for the keyword “stupid” you can redirect all traffic that comes from Google from that particular keyword into another site–perhaps one of those you suspect to be behind the attack.

If you’re using Apache as your webserver, here’s what you can add to your .htaccess file:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?google\.com/search\?q=(insert keyword here) [NC]
RewriteRule \.html$ http://www.new-website.com/ [R=302,L]

“new-website.com” is the site you want to redirect visitors from Google into. This basically says that for every user that comes from http://www.google.com/search?q=(keywords), these users will be directed to another page, www.new-website.com. In effect, the user will think that the result actually directs to new-website.com instead of your site.

However, the result on the Google SERP would still be your own URL and the resulting text snippet will still come from your site. And if a user decides to copy the URL and directly access it from a browser’s address bar, then it will still be your page that he gets to open. But most users click on Google results, anyway, so most likely you will succeed at this.

Here’s one known case of Googlebombing and a succesful deflection using referrer-redirection. In 2005, the keyword “sinungaling” was used to bomb the profile of a Philippine government official. “Sinungaling” literally translates to “liar,” so you can imagine how embarassing it would be for an incumbent official to be called a liar, on Google no less.

In the height of the Googlebombing incident, users who click on the link were directed to the blog of an anti-Government group that claimed to be responsible for starting the Googlebomb attack. To date, users who click on the result link on Google will be referred back to google.com.

Good luck!