Google removes Google-bombing results
- 5 Comment
If you have been around any kind of forum too logn I am sure you have heard of the famous Google bombings such as “failure” and “miserable failure”. If not I had better explain before I thruoughly confuse you. A google bombing is when a person or group of persons builds up tons of links to a selected site with a given anchor text so as to rank it for that keyword. The problem with this is the site is usually very unrelated to that term and is usually done as a prank.
To combat this Google released an Algo Update which is supposed to work on stopping Google bombing. Will this effect any normal rankings we deserve? Will Google suddenly destroy all rankings for phrases that do not appear on the page it is ranking?
A search for “failure” or “miserable failure” for a long time had brought up the White House’s official biographical page for President George W. Bush. As mentioned before this was caused by pranksters linking to the Bush biography from thousands of sites. Because Google uses links to rank a site they could rank Bushs Bio for ‘miserable failure’ when the only failures where the pranksters.
But recently Google decided to fix this. It seems that Google has had numerous complaints about these rankings insisting that by allowing them Google is showing political bias. Now I have to agree that it was not very nice of these fellows to do this however Google had nothing to do with it. Yes they could have removed it long before now and I am not quite sure why they didn’t but that is beside the point.
Now what can we expect to happen now that Google is trying to put these ‘Google bombers’ out of business? Will this ruin any of our natural rankings?
I don’t think so for the most part. Here is my theory on what Google has done. Somebody at Webmaster-Talk said that Google was going to use ‘phrase-checking’ to see if a site is being google-bombed. By this they meant that if on the page there is no mention of that keyword it may be considered Google-bombing. Now this is an outrageous idea because if that were correct over night I would have lost probably 75% of my rankings on Google. What I do think is that Google is starting to use a relevance calculator for this problem. Google already has used relevance for ranking sites but now it will use it to not rank sites for phrases Google thinks are irrelevant. This means that dog kennels and doggie pens would be considered relevant. What could throw up a red flag is if a shoe site is getting thousands of links from irrelevant pages for a phrase that is totally unrelated to anything on the site. Again seo, sem, 1st page rankings, search engine optimization marketing, google, etc etc are all related. I don’t think you have to worry even if it is not directly related.
That is just my personal theory. I could be wrong but from what I have seen it seems accurate. I also think Google has done manual editing of results to remove these pages for the phrases they got bombed for. And I don’t think this algo change is so drastic that it could ruin your site overnight. However it might help clean up reults for sites that are un-related to the search. Who knows. We will just have to wait and watch google and see what happens. I am not really worried. I haven’t lost any rankings so far 
Google webmaster post on google bombing: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/09/googlebombing-failure.html
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