By now most of you have heard about a group of people who call their self Anonymous who Googlebombed the Google SERPS with the terms “dangerous cult” and “brainwashing cult” and aimed the Googlebomb at the Church of Scientology’s website.
Why should any of us care? Because we can learn an important lesson here!
What’s the lesson? The Lesson to be learned is; no matter what Google or any other “Authority” states, Googlebombing still works and works well!
What is Googlebombing?
Googlebombingis when a mass amount of people create links pointing to a website with a certain anchor text. In the above example, Anonymous‘s groups went around the web leaving links to the Church of Scientology. The anchor text of those links were either “dangerous cult” or “brainwashing cult”.
What this did was make the Church of Scientology‘s website rank high for the terms “dangerous cult” and “brainwashing cult”.
When I first read about this last week, the Church ranked #1 for “dangerous cult” and #3 for “brainwashing cult.” Just before writing this post, the Church has scored a #1 spot for “brainwashing cult”.
What Blog Owners and Webmaster Should Know
It was a few years or so ago when people Googlebombed the word “miserable failure” and “waffles”. What happened was that when someone went to Google and typed in “miserable failure”, George Bush’s profile on The White House website would show up or in the case of “waffles”, John Kerry’s campaign site would show up.
Google claimedthat they tweaked the algorithm that would prevent future Googlebombs from working. For one thing, the keyword was suppose to have appeared on the page that was being Googlebombed.
However, in the case with the Church, the word “Cult” doesn’t show up on that page or any other page on the website. I’m guessing Google will be tweaking that algorithm just a little bit more….;)
What this really shows us all is how important anchor text is to the links pointed at our websites and how important Google considers anchor text when ranking a site!
You should never forget either one of those facts!
Does this mean you should forget about on site SEOand concentrate on creating backlinks with relevant anchor text pointing at your website?
Certainly not.
Optimizing your site for Google rankings, as well as ranking for other search engines, is still important. It’s just not as important as creating relevant backlinks to your website!
4 responses so far ↓
1 Alan Johnson // Feb 3, 2008 at 4:55 pm
They are indeed far from being perfect because let’s face it, if that were the case, we wouldn’t have seen the whole nofollow drama
Alan Johnson
2 Niccolo Svengali // Feb 8, 2008 at 3:22 pm
We need at least one more top level SE, so that Google is not synonymous with search.
Nobody talks about b0mbing Yahoo or MSN, you’ll notice.
3 dan // Feb 24, 2008 at 10:04 pm
Maybe its not googlebombing, maybe Google knows the truth
I think Google would be crazy to change their algorithm to give little or no relevance to incoming links. While they can be gamed they are a fairly good indicator of a links content.
No one talks about bombing the other SEs, but its not worth it based on traffic, which means Google has to be doing something right…
4 Tiffany // Mar 5, 2008 at 4:33 am
Nice article. I don’t really understand how Google’s page rank work. So, this article make me understand better.
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