I recently came across this page, which contains some google bombing things to help the site grow: Isn't it google bombing if you just focus on two keywords, which they are doing? Their links are starting to show up on every forum that I visit.
Well, what exactly is your question? Do you want to know what the definition to "google bombing" is? Do you want to know if "google bombing" is illegal? (That is the title of this thread) or Do you want to know if something like this: "We have just released a new system for you to help Promote Marapets. Its simple to do and rewards you weekly. You basically copy and paste a html code onto a website, or you copy and paste a forum code to your forum signature on other sites and you can start gaining the rewards. Unlike the Referral System, you do not need to refer new members to the site to get a prize. All you need to do is add the code to a site to get prizes. Its works by recording the site you have placed the code onto and each week calculates how many Cool Prizes you should get by the number of different sites it shows on! Prizes can even be Account Upgrades credit, DNA or a limited edition minipet!" is considered google bombing?
Yes. Yes. Yes, as well, because I thought a system like that would consider google bombing, since they'd receive a ton of incoming links in a short period of time.
Well, this thread just got a bit deeper then . For the term "Google Bombing", read this: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/09/googlebombing-failure.html. Basically, Google describes it as linking to a site/page with inaccurate anchor text. Your definition of Google Bombing is probably something along the lines of pointing a mass amount of links at a website. Right? If that's the case then no, receiving a mass amount of links is not "illegal" (there has to be other factors in place to get you de-indexed from Google). If there is a hot news article on CNN, then they will gain thousands of links in a short time period, right? That does not mean that CNN.com is going to get dropped out of the Google index. If that website you mentioned is offering an incentive to link to them, that is no better or worse then an affiliate program. They get links/traffic, you get money/prizes.
As far as I can see, everytime that image loads, it adds one hit to the database. Then they can click it and gain a referal, but it will still record number of times its been viewed. It's not illegal, it's no different to the links in your sig, just this one counts the times its been viewed, presumably rewarding the owner of the button which has the biggest pageviews with a prize or whatever you get on that site. It's a simple PHP GD image. Notice in the code: <img src=http://www.marapets.com/button.[B]php[/B]?id=0 border=0> Code (markup): Notice it ends in php? It means it's a dynamic image. Because I'm not registered and therefore not logged on, it gives me id=0 and won't reward me. If you are logged on, it will give you a different ID and so it will reward you. If you are actually into this game, you could just set a refresher on the image a get the rewards. But don't make it too obvious .