Good-bye, Google Bomb
By Garance Franke-Ruta
Bloggers, take note: the old-school Google bomb is no more.
That's right, the online behemoth best known for its search engine
says that it has rejiggered its legendary and proprietary technology so
that online efforts by bloggers to manipulate its top-secret search
algorithm to create cheeky, offensive and decidedly off-message answers to searches will no longer work.
"It was fun" while it lasted, said Rick Klau, a member of the Google
strategic partner development content acquisition team, at a search
engine optimization training session for political bloggers in
Washington, D.C., this afternoon. But, he said, "Google bombs don't
work anymore."
Indeed, the changes to eliminate Google bombs were instituted more than a year-and-a-half ago.
But that hasn't stopped political bloggers of the left and right, who
have announced (or worried over) fresh efforts to manipulate search
engine rankings as recently as this May (see here) and June (see here, and here).
Here's
how the old Google bombs worked: Say a group of people wanted to
associate a certain Washington politician -- let's call him Mr. Smith
-- with a particular insult -- like sleazeball -- and have articles
about Mr. Smith come up high in Google search results when people
search for the keyword, sleazeball. They would all link to Mr. Smith's
Web page, wrapping the link's HTML code around the word sleazeball.
Presto-chango: Via the links, the algorithm made a connection between the name and the subject matter, and adjusted accordingly.
That doesn't work anymore, said Klau, because the company today can
spot these swarms and neutralize their effect. "We are far more
perceptive when it comes to these link swarms that show up in a matter
of hours or days," said Klau.
So why haven't bloggers stopped trying to game the system? Work-arounds
may be one reason. So might the increasingly sophisticated nature of
today's Google bombs -- what Open Left's Chris Bowers calls a "2.0 version of the Googlebomb"
-- where the goal is to influence the search rank of a slew of negative
news articles about a politician rather than tie his name to a keyword.
Klau said that he's "not aware of any [successful] Google bombs or
equivalents over the past year" -- but the new efforts aren't Google
bombs, per se.
As Bowers explained it, "What I'm doing isn't a Google bomb." It's a
much harder to detect effort "to alternately optimize John McCain" in
the Google search engine rankings, by linking his name to nine
mainstream new organizations's stories that raise questions about the
GOP presidential contender.
So good-bye Google bomb; hello, Google bomb 2.0.
