Google may have fixed a link bomb in January that had President George W. Bush listed as the top results for “failure” or “miserable failure”, but now due to a White House oversight the President is once again ranked number one for the search term “failure” on Google
The White House had seemingly put the Google bombing behind them.
So how did the President once again yield a number one ranking for the search term “failure?”
Danny Sullivan explains,” The White House used the word “failure” on Bush’s page, which resulted in the page becoming relevant for the query again.”
” If the White House was smart, they’d have realized it can never ever ever ever use the words “miserable” or “failure” or both of them together without risking showing up in Google’s top results for searches on those words.”
Here is the exact text from the President’s radio address that has him associated with the term failure. “The bottom line is that Congress’s failure to fund our troops will mean that some of our military families could wait longer for their loved ones to return from the front lines.”
Sullivan also points out that just the single use of the word “failure” was enough to activate the link bomb. Once the word is no longer on the White House home page the ranking should return to its previous state.
Past Google bombs include the search term “weapons of mass destruction” which displayed a fictitious “Internet Explorer Error Page” and “French military victories” which displays a bogus Google page that says” no results found for French military victories, did you mean French military defeats?”
