So what is a Google bomb? Basically, for fun or spite, a large amount of webmasters link to a particular page using a specified word. They did this for the George W. Bush page on www.whitehouse.gov using the word failure. This in turn “pushed” relevancy to the Bush page for the word failure and up until today the page ranked #1 for it on Google. Google claims not to hand edit their results and say the change was to the algorithm, not to just one site. And since they certainly could not eliminate the relevancy of the text that links to a page, it leaves us with one obvious option; they now require the linking text to appear on the site. It has always been the best SEO practice to have the text on the page and have links to that page using the same text, but in the past, enough links using the same word or phrase would be enough…..but apparently not anymore.
This makes sense; how could a web page be relevant for “word” if “word” never appears on the page? About time they fixed it.
Tags: google bomb, google bombing, search engine algorithm, george bush, white house