06.15.08
Googlebombing Obama?
First, of all, I’ll explain what ‘Googlebombing’ is, for those of you who have not run into the term previously. The idea is that when I link to your site, the text I use as my link—the anchor text—will be associated with you. If enough people linked to you using the same text, searching on this text might result in you being found high, even though you didn’t actually intend for that word or phrase to be a keyword.
So far it’s pretty simple. That’s how it’s supposed to work. If thousands of people read my previous post of funny political ads and link to it using the phrase “humorous political banners”, I might get enough traffic out of it to go into the biz of making and selling bumper stickers with my designs. Google would see all those links and figure that that’s what people found important on my site.
“Googlebombing” is where you use this technique to link a word or phrase that the recipient would not have wanted linked. So when hundreds of bloggers and other sites linked the anchor text “miserable failure” to George Bush’s biography on whitehouse.gov, guess who was number 1 on the search for those words. You guessed it.
Google has since modified the algorithm so if something like this comes up, something which is intended to subvert search results, they can readjust it by hand. So if you really bomb something, you’ll get found out and it will have no effect.
I hope you understand, because this is going to be on the test. For many people it’s probably a new concept.
The reason I’ve written what I’ve written so far is that there is a campaign to “googlebomb” Obama, and you need to understand what googlebombing is to see what’s really going on. The neocon crackpots (see what I did there?) at that site have put up a page they would like people to copy into their blogs and onto their websites. Go look at it and tell me what the anchor text is.
That’s right. The anchor text is “Obama”. So what you have is a bunch of links from the name Obama to various lies about him. This is the opposite of googlebombing, and it will have no effect on Obama’s ranking in any google search.
So what you have is right wingnuts who are so unclear on the concept that they’ve put together an utterly useless disinformation campaign, while congratulating themselves for being truly clever. Good work, guys. It will keep you out of real trouble.
