Good-bye, Google Bomb’s
By Garance Franke-Ruta
Bloggers, take note: the old-school Google bomb is no more.
That’s right, the online behemoth best known for its search engine says that it has rejiggered its legendary and proprietary technology so that online efforts by bloggers to manipulate its top-secret search algorithm to create cheeky, offensive and decidedly off-message answers to searches will no longer work.
“It was fun” while it lasted, said Rick Klau, a member of the Google strategic partner development content acquisition team, at a search engine optimization training session for political bloggers in Washington, D.C., this afternoon. But, he said, “Google bombs don’t work anymore.”
Indeed, the changes to eliminate Google bombs were instituted more than a year-and-a-half ago. But that hasn’t stopped political bloggers of the left and right, who have announced (or worried over) fresh efforts to manipulate search engine rankings as recently as this May (see here) and June (see here, and here).
Here’s how the old Google bombs worked: Say a group of people wanted to associate a certain Washington politician — let’s call him Mr. Smith — with a particular insult — like sleazeball — and have articles about Mr. Smith come up high in Google search results when people search for the keyword, sleazeball. They would all link to Mr. Smith’s Web page, wrapping the link’s HTML code around the word sleazeball. Story Continued At:Â Blog. Washington Post