Recently Google announced the end of GoogleBombing. I think we should all put this to the test, and now there's a movement to do so (although not just to test the bombing, it's for a good cause as well). Personally I think this will serve as a good example of whether or not it still works. Poor woman with her non-profit blog, promoting breast milk, getting needlessly attacked by The National Pork Board's pork lawyers. He slogan of "The Other White Milk" is being viewed as a trademark violation. Now, the official site for that particular association doesn't have a whole lot of links pointing to it from unique domains, so it should actually be fairly easy to get her blog to outrank it. Shoemoney and some other heavy hitters are already in on the action, so I don't think it will take much effort, but every little bit helps. Now, currently the Netscape story here ranks #16 for that phrase, but I'm pretty sure that's just because it had a homepage link when the homepage was spidered, and am guessing that ranking will drop soon (probably by Monday at the latest). So, if you have a blog, please drop her a link, and if anyone knows of any good pro-bono lawyers, point them her way. I'm guessing we could get her to top 10 within a week. -Michael
Actually, that should still work, because the phrase chosen is relevant to her website. People are effectively helping her SEO her site - sounds like a good cause too. Google Bombs are (or were) specifically phrases that were not obviously relevant to the site in question. Like 'failure' for Bush. I mean, however much of a failure he may be (I'm no fan of his Middle East policies), the word failure isn't likely to be on his site. This lady does have the relevant words on her website, I take it.
Hopefully all the negative attention will make the Pork Board re-think their tactics and she won't need a lawyer.
And I agree... however, since the announcement of the change there have been rumors and speculation that it would be a blanket change affecting all seo efforts, with link gains now resulting in new penalties. Hopefully something like this could put an end to that kind of gossip being spread as fact. Oh, that would be awesome. I think it sucks that they would pressure someone doing a good thing like this. If they knew what they were doing they would have supported her and garnered some kudos for donating to a good cause. Personally I wonder is some anti-breast feeding advocate isn't partially behind all of this. -Michael
What is the Google bomb for this again? I don't see it anywhere - can you give us the exact details - anchor text and link.
It's in my original post with the offending side's anchor text. Oh, btw, how's this for speedy results? She's now #6 for that phrase. So... to all of those spouting that whole "building links too fast will always hurt you" nonsense, might want to actually test what you preach before you spread your theories as fact. -Michael
Neat experiment but somehow, I think you need to keep track of the number of links pointing to page with specified anchor text.
Unless Google were to completely change their ranking methods, there is no way to truly stop Google bombs from happening. Which is awesome!
Ah, well, that will be tricky. The page is only 2 days old, and I don't think the serious linking started to happen until late yesterday or today. Unless you manually track down who linked form where, the only tool to track links really is the se's themselves. Gotta wait for them to find the links. And actually, this thread should be a good benchmark. DP often outranks things just by mentioning them for as long as the topic stays on the front page of that particular forum. Since no one is linking to this thread with that anchor text though, I wouldn't expect it to outrank her site. -Michael
Ok, it looks like since the Pork Board appologized, she had G remove that page from the cache. Made it as high as #5 afaik, didn't check yesterday though. Bummer man, made a good test. -Michael
It's only young sites that can be hurt by getting links too fast, too quickly. Properly aged sites won't be in trouble.
Well, I think they can change it enough to stop google bombing as they have done with the famous "miserable failure" google bomb. It's pretty simple, if a bunch of sites link to a site with the same anchor text and that anchor text is nowhere to be found on the site and isn't semantically related in any way then it raises a google-bomb flag especially if a lot of these outlinking sites are blogs.
Btw, I think I figured a way to re-institute GWB bio to come up for [miserable failure] again. If anyone is interested in helping me test this please PM me. Will require a few links to test. -Michael
Any one got 100,000 of co-op weight! That would be an easy way to test it! Though GoogleBowling might knock it out of the listings.
I doubt it. That would require Google to remove all the links that point to a site using the Googlebomb term manually. What they are saying is that they have made changes to their algorithm with regards to Googlebombing.
Update to the update, she's back in the serps. Waiting till I get a good handful of volunteer linkage to test it before I say what it is. -Michael