Jalaj P. Jha Technical & Miscellaneous Ramblings

Cheerful Achievement – Dormant GoogleBomb talks rises again

While Googlebomb has been a field of interest to Technical Experts in Search Engine Optimization field, the major world heard of it first when news of Google serving George Bush's page as first result for keyword 'Miserable Failures' broke. Google said that they have modified the algorithms such that most of such existing Googlebombs and those in making would fade away and people stopped talking (not SEOs, just for information).

Googlebomb is again in news with Obama's page making it to top for search keyword "Cheerful achievement". The page though lost it's position soon after the news broke out and every other blog started writing on this subject. But now the world again knows that Googlebombs still exists (SEOs always knew that)

What is Google Bomb? May be a look into the history of search engine's history will help a little.

The earliest search engines indexed only a part of the page specifically the title of the page and the meta tags describing the site/page and the keywords relevant to the page. With time such search engine lost popularity as the meta tags were the parts that were never visible to the user and thus SEOs (SEOs described here in the post are Black Hat SEOs unless stated otherwise) took to stuff irrelevant keywords which would make the site/page appear on search results for irrelevant keywords while the user would get driven to a page he didn't expect.

Advanced search engines took to index the whole page. When a user searched for particular keywords(s) the same were searched for in the whole page. To determine the relative placements on the search results each page were checked for multiple occurrences of the keyword(s) termed as keyword density. Higher the keyword density higher would be the placement. Needless to say SEOs (hey Whitehats here) took to draft the page content in a way that the keywords relevant to the site appeared many a times on the page, while others (Blackhats!) even took to stuff irrelevant dense text either at the bottom of the page or with invisible/less visible characters with font color same as background color.

When Google made its appearance in Search Engine Market it astonished everyone with most relevant search results that were because of its unique algorithms. Apart from the ways by which everyone was deciding relative positioning, it added many other ways (which it calls Signals) to the existing set. To determine the importance of a web page it looked for number of web pages outside the site that linked to it calling this method 'Backrub' and associated a number to each page which it called Pagerank (out of scope of this post). Next it also checked for the text that appeared on the link on such pages called as the 'Link Text', thus giving more importance to keywords as other sites remember that page/site for. This gave birth to Googlebomb.

You want to rank well for a certain keyword(s) somehow get other sites to link to your page/site with link texts as your target keywords and you have created a Googlebomb. In this immediate case the person responsible for “Cheerful Achievement” bomb posted his intention on his blog and informed all friends and followers on Twitter to add links to their blogrolls. As Google continued to crawl and index those sites the links to Obama’s page with link text “Cheerful Achievement” continued to grow and within 24 hours it was the top result.

Does this implies that Google search results are unreliable and that anybody can game that? No because link text is just one of the signal from as many as 200 signals that Google takes into consideration when positioning search results. In immediate case the terms “Cheerful Achievement” that were used were something that people rarely search for and thus had very few pages that qualified to be shown on search result page. The attempt to form the Googlebomb though succeeded initially because of less number of qualifying pages got diffused as soon as the world started writing on it. Pages on the web with these keywords grew and the Obama’s page that was enjoying the top status due to less competition lost its position

Google realizes such misuses and continues to reduce the weightage of link text and other such signals which can be gamed giving more weightage to others that are less liable to gaming or are not publicly known. Google continues to give best results overall and thus is my favorite since 2000.