What is a Google Bomb?
A Google® bomb or Googlebomb is an orchestrated attempt to inflate a site’s search engine ranking, forcing it to turn up in the top of the search results for a specific phrase. Google® bombs are also known as link bombs; the “Google®” is a reference to a very popular search engine. Many people have undertaken Google® bombs for the purpose of satire, comedy, or political comment, and the practice became a topic of wider discussion around 2001, when several notable Google® bombs attacking then-President George Bush made international headlines. Google® bombs take advantage of the fact that search engines tend to push sites up in their rankings when people repeatedly link to them with the same anchor text. Anchor text is the visible part of a hyperlink; for example, most people who link to wiseGEEK make “wiseGEEK,” their anchor text. Because of this practice, wiseGEEK comes up first in the search results for this anchor text, because search engines believe that it is the most relevant to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb “Google bomb or Googlewash is Internet slang for a certain kind of attempt to influence the ranking (called PageRank) of a given page in results returned by the Google search engine, often with humorous or political intentions. Due to the way that Google’s algorithm works, a page will be ranked higher if the sites that link to that page use consistent anchor text. A Google bomb is created if a large number of sites link to the page in this manner. Google bomb is used both as a verb and a noun. The phrase “Google bombing” was added to the New Oxford American Dictionary in May 2005.
You may have noticed me mention google bombs occasionally. They are incredibly useful in the promotion of special purpose websites such as the ones skeptics build. Essentially it involves as many different web sites as possible linking to a specific target site with a specific piece of text. Google uses an algorithm called Page Rank which uses (among other things) number of other sites which link to a given site, to determine its ranking in results. The algorithm has changed over the years since the original patent, and many aspects of it are now considered trade secrets by Google. But it is known that aside from the number of incoming links, other aspects which are considered are the content of the target site and the text used to link to the site. Page rank and algorithms like it can give an idea of the overall importance of a site on the web, but how are results for individual searches ranked? That has to be decided in a way that is specific to the search being done. And so Google c
