Posts Tagged ‘Google Bomb’
Vatican Google Bomb
A page rank 3 website has google bombed the term “vatican” through a a twitter feed.
In what seems to be the latest high-profile Google Bomb in a while, a search in Google.IT last week returned links to a website named upon child-abuse in the top search result.
Interestingly enough, the site that was being linked to was seemingly empty, with the exception of some cleverly crafted meta-information.
After some back-link analysis on the site, we found a prominent blog with page rank 3 and some 50+ pages had a twitter feed containing the link, and a reference to the vatican.
A screen shot of the top position is here
This demonstrates that black-hat SEO is still powerful way of getting your site to the top of the SERPs in the short term, however we are adamantly against the practice.
A search in Google IT today has shown that the false website is no longer indexed.
Latest Google Bomb: Gmail Down
It has been the topic of much discussion recently on news websites and forums: Gmail was down and allegedly exploited by porn sites this week.
Google was in fact experiencing technical difficulties this Wednesday, and given the large number of subscribers, many users were searching for answers to explain why.
In the most recent public case of Google Bombing, Search Engine Optimisers were fortunate enough for Google to be offline long enough for users to start searching for ‘Gmail Down‘..
It seems those opportunistic folks who were triggering the search term and setting up groups in Gmail forums, were directing visitors to pornography sites which has outraged many, and led to some interesting, and perhaps misinformed media coverage.
Google Bombing is a method of black-hat SEO, whereby hundreds of website create text links (or anchor text) of words you want Google to rank contained within a hyperlink, and therefore anyone searching for that particular keyword in Google; or any search engine whose algorithm is similar to Google’s, will list the destination site at the number one spot in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
One of the most popular Google Bomb references is the search term ‘miserable failure’ which directed searchers to the White House (USA Government) profile page of George Bush. An ‘I’m feeling lucky‘ search would instantly take the user to the site, causing some hilarity and ridicule as the ‘trick’ of displaying the page spread through the web.
Either way, it seems Gmail’s service has been restored, and a few people giggle over the incident, but it reminds us that email services aren’t bullet-proof, even those supplied by someone as big as Google, and with a little black-hat SEO, you can still get to the top of the search engines, although we highly recommend against this.