The practice of people creating a multitude of links to President George Bush’s WhiteHouse.gov profile with the words ‘miserable failure’ as anchor text has been known as Google bombing. Now Google has made a change rendering that Google Bomb a dud.
Doing a search for miserable failure is no longer as entertaining as it used to be. No more seeing George Bush or Jimmy Carter, or a handful of other people, appear at the top of the Google search results for those terms.
Google has implemented some algorithm updates to take the fun out of Google bombing, according to Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan. He described the change as a move to “stop such mass link pranks from working.”
The change also took out the ‘waffles’ Google bomb that used to bring up Senator John Kerry’s website as a top result. Legitimate discussion about the tactic remains in place as Danny noted:
This is because the change is designed to stop the pranks from happening rather than legitimate commentary about such activities. Google isn’t saying exactly how this is being done. But Google says it’s done automatically, without any human intervention.
“It’s completely algorithmic,” said Google spam fighting czar Matt Cutts, adding “we’re not going to claim it’s 100 percent perfect.”
Google also provided commentary on its Webmaster Central blog:
The impact of this new algorithm is very limited in scope and impact, but we hope that the affected queries are more relevant for searchers.
Now to provide a little context. Google made these changes only a few days after V7N announced it had come up with a link-selling program that would be undetectable to search engines. After Matt Cutts discussed it, V7N dropped the ‘undetectable’ claim from their marketing of the service.
Prior to that, Matt had posted a brief observation about ‘pay-for-blogging’ services. “Links in those paid-for posts should be made in a way that doesn’t affect search engines.”
It looks more like Google’s bomb squad was more keen on defusing possible competitors to AdSense than in saving the world from a miserable failure.
As a business, they may have decided that being a conduit for someone else’s money-making plan doesn’t make much sense. Improving query relevance for a relative handful of search terms is a bonus.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
