Alston Grove

I heard about Google bombs from reading Dean’s blog entry. A Google bomb is an attempt to influence the ranking of a site in Google’s search results. While Google’s algorithm for ranking is secret, people have figured out that a website is ranked higher if the sites that link to a page use consistent text.

One of the most famous Google bombs was a campaign by Adam Mathes to get the search results of “talentless hack” to list the website of his friend Andy Pressman. Adam got enough webloggers to link Andy’s site with the text “talentless hack” that Pressman’s site became the number result in a Google search.

The interesting thing about Google bombs is that once they become popular, people talk about them, and the bomb is knocked out of the top spot. Some people think there’s no reason to counter Google bombs because of this natural effect.

If you went and read the comments on Dean’s blog, then you know we tried a Google bomb of our own. We both linked to Gayle’s website using the text of “fishies for president“. And sure enough, as of right now, it’s the number one website listed for that search on Google.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 12th, 2005 at 8:32 pm and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.