I’ve had several people write in asking about how to use the new method of Google bombing to raise your rankings, and many people in the forums have dropped their own little bombs to test out how it works.
Join the Google bomb discussion.
The short answer is that Google bombing your own url with this method probably doesn’t do a thing. For example: www.yoursite.com/?your-keywords-stuffed-here most likely won’t help much and I haven’t seen if this technique does anything with competitive keywords. (You’ll get more milage from anchor text.)
It’s worth a try though, especially if you’ve got a test site to fool around with (I’d suggest setting up a little affiliate site you don’t mind getting banned – that way while it’s ranking well from all your high risk techniques you’ll at least make a little money :).
Incidentally, I heard word that this technique is not new. It was new to me though, and my source didn’t say where he’d heard of this kind of bombing before and informed me through our article submission form and left no email. 😛
WebMetro found it interesting that “Google still values keywords within URL when it ranks sites. I thought Google would put this on the bottom of the pile when it comes to SEO, but this proves that it may actually be in the middle of the pile or closer to the top.”
This to me is the most interesting aspect of this particular Google Bomb – that the text in the url can have significant effect on where your pages appear.
Remember this when you’re naming the files on your site – include descriptive keywords (with hyphens) you’d like those pages to be found for.
WebMetro also found it interesting that, “Google cannot tell that cnn.com is the same as cnn.com/?keyword.” What is the importance of this? What could this indicate about optimization? Perhaps something about duplicate content…
Tcady thought the bomb was cool, but wondered too if it had any practical application. She suggested I “try something with a very competitive string in it and see if it ranks – like ‘digital cameras.'”
And so: http://www.google.com/?digital-camera. At the very least it will be interesting to see where it appears in the listings. I’ll report more on this when I have some results.
“But as silly as it may seem,” Tcady concluded, “it is pretty cool to see one can make something so simple appear on google in the top 10 overnight :)”
New Google Bomb Test Results
My particular bomb (this technique’s not as powerful as a standard bomb) is now third in Google, beneath the first place article I wrote about the new bombing method and an article Dan Thies wrote about Teoma early last year.
The link appears this way in the third position: www.yahoo.com/?Teoma-Rules, and links directly to Yahoo’s site.
I got it there by creating a link like this: www.yahoo.com/?Teoma-Rules.
It’s interesting to note that the other bombs I set up didn’t work (or haven’t worked yet). The as-yet unworking links looked like this: www.Google.com/#Teoma-Rules, substituting the pound sign instead of the question mark (the question mark didn’t resolve properly – I want to test it here anyways: www.Google.com/?Teoma-Rules)
So now let’s try this for a super competitive keyword: www.yahoo.com/?digital-camera and http://www.google.com/?digital-camera. (Seven and a half million pages currently rank for the term “digital camera,” so finding the url may be a bit tedious.)
Also be sure to note that this bomb as Philipp originally created it was intended to test the power of high PR sites on the false parameter – he wondered if the PageRank of the sites he linked to had anything to do with where the bombed url would appear.
Perhaps this link: www.Google.com/?Teoma-Rules will steal the third position.
Garrett French is the editor of Murdok’s eBusiness channel. You can talk to him directly at WebProWorld, the eBusiness Community Forum.
