A Google bomb (also referred to as a 'link bomb') is Internet slang for a certain kind of attempt to influence the ranking of a given page in results returned by the Google search engine, often with humorous or political intentions. Because of the way that Google's algorithm works, a page will be ranked higher if the sites that link to that page use consistent anchor text. A Google bomb is created if a large number of sites link to the page in this manner. Google bomb is used both as a verb and a noun. The phrase "Google bombing" was introduced to the New Oxford American Dictionary in May 2005. Google bombing is closely related to spamdexing, the practice of deliberately modifying HTML pages to increase the chance of their being placed close to the beginning of search engine results, or to influence the category to which the page is assigned in a misleading or dishonest manner.

The term Googlewashing was coined in 2003 to describe the use of media manipulation to change the perception of a term, or push out competition from search engine results pages (SERPs).

History

The first Google bomb known about by a significant number of people was the one that caused the search term "more evil than Satan himself" to bring up the Microsoft homepage as the top result. Numerous people have made claims to having been accountable for the Microsoft Google bomb, though none have been verified.

In September 2000 the first Google bomb with a verifiable creator was created by Hugedisk Men's Magazine, a now-defunct online humor magazine, when it linked the text "dumb motherfucker" to a site selling George W. Bush-related merchandise. A Google search for this term would return the pro-Bush online store as its top result. Hugedisk had also unsuccessfully attempted to Google bomb an equally derogatory term to bring up an Al Gore-related site. After a fair amount of publicity the George W. Bush-related merchandise site retained lawyers who sent a cease and desist letter to Hugedisk, thereby ending the Google bomb.

On April 6, 2001 in an article in the online magazine uber.nu Adam Mathes is credited with coining the term "Google Bombing." In the article Mathes details his connection of the search term "talentless hack" to the website of his friend Andy Pressman by recruiting fellow webloggers to link to his friend's page with the desired term. However, Archimedes Plutonium is known to have used the phrase "search engine bombing" (and variants, including "searchengine bombing" and "searchenginebombed") on Usenet as early as 1997.

Beyond Google

Other search engines use similar techniques to rank results, so Yahoo!, AltaVista, and HotBot are also affected by Google bombs. A search for "miserable failure" or "failure" on September 29, 2006 brought up the official George W. Bush biography number one on Google, Yahoo! and MSN and number two on Ask.com. On June 2, 2005, Yooter reported that George Bush is now ranked first for the keyword 'miserable', 'failure' and 'miserable failure' in both Google and Yahoo!.

The BBC, reporting on Google bombs in 2002, used the headline "Google Hit By Link Bombers", acknowledging to some degree the idea of "link bombing." In 2004, the Search Engine Watch site suggested that the term should be "link bombing" because of its application beyond Google, and continues to use that term as it is considered more accurate.

Google's response

Google originally took the position that it would not alter the result (or any other Google bombed results) because it wished to preserve the integrity of its search engine. On 28 September 2005, a Google blog written by Marissa Mayer, Google Director of Consumer Web Products, began to appear with the search results, in order to explain the situation and their reasoning for not manually editing the search results.

"We do not condone the practice of googlebombing, or any other action that seeks to affect the integrity of our search results, but we're also reluctant to alter our results by hand in order to prevent such items from showing up. Pranks like this may be distracting to some, but they do not affect the overall quality of our search service, whose objectivity, as always, remains the core of our mission."

In early 2007, Google changed their indexing structure so that Google bombs such as "Miserable failure" would “typically return commentary, discussions, and articles” about the tactic itself. Google announced the changes on its official blog. In response to criticism for allowing the Google bombs, Matt Cutts, the head of the Google's Webspam team, said that Google bombs had not “been a very high priority for us.”

“Over time, we've seen more people presume that they are Google's opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Google-bombed queries. That's not true, and it seemed like it was worth trying to correct that misperception.”

Motivations

Competitions

In May 2004, the websites Dark Blue and SearchGuild teamed up to create what they termed the "SEO Challenge" to Google bomb the phrase "nigritude ultramarine".

The contest sparked controversy around the Internet, as some groups worried that search engine optimization (SEO) companies would abuse the techniques used in the competition to alter queries more relevant to the average user. This fear was offset by the belief that Google would alter their algorithm based on the methods used by the Google bombers.

In September 2004, another SEO contest was created. This time, the objective was to get the top result for the phrase "seraphim proudleduck". A large sum of money was offered to the winner, but the competition turned out to be a hoax.

In .net magazine, Issue 134, March 2005, a contest was created among five professional web site developers to make their site the number one listed site for the made-up phrase "crystalline incandescence".

Political activism

See also: Political Google bombs in the 2004 U.S. Presidential election

Some of the most famous Google bombs are also expressions of political opinion (e.g. "liar" leading to Tony Blair or "miserable failure", or even simply "failure" leading to the White House's biography of George W. Bush). In general, one of the keys to Google's popularity has been its ability to capture what ordinary Web citizens ("netizens") believe to be important via the information provided in webpage links. However, Google is reluctant to stop organized or commercial exploitation of their algorithms.

One extremely successful, long-lasting and widespread link bomb has been the linking of the term "Scientology" to Operation Clambake. In this case, the index rating clearly emerges from both the individual decisions of pagewriters and reporters and an organized effort led by Operation Clambake itself. The Church of Scientology has also sometimes been accused of an attempt at Google bombing for making a large number of websites linking terms "Scientology" and "L. Ron Hubbard" to each other. On the 29th January 2008 the Google bomb linking the search "dangerous cult" to the homepage of The Church of Scientology was created, leaving doubts as to the reliability of Google's anti-bombing algorithms.

In 2003, Steven Lerner, creator of Albino Blacksheep, created a parody webpage entitled "French Military Victories." When typed into Google, the first result leads to a page that resembles Google, which reads, "Your search - French military victories - did not match any documents. Did you mean French military defeats?" The page proved to be quite popular, as it received over 50,000 hits within 18 hours of its release. Links near the top of the page lead to a simplified list of French military history. The page is still first in results for "French military victories."

In 2004, Jewish writer and activist Daniel Sieradski urged visitors to his blog to link to the Wikipedia article for "Jew" in response to findings that a search for "Jew" returned the anti-Semitic website Jew Watch at the top of the results. The campaign was successful in displacing the site from the top result, although www.jewwatch.org still appears on the first page of search results. In the same year the Persian Gulf naming dispute was the subject of a Google bomb by an Iranian blogger named Pendar Yousefi.

A further campaign was organized by columnist Dan Savage after former US Senator Rick Santorum made several controversial statements regarding homosexuality. The Google bombing was part of Savage's campaign to start using the word "santorum" for the combination of semen, lubricant and excrement that results from anal sex, and propelled the website created for that purpose to a high result for "santorum".

In France, groups opposing the DADVSI copyright bill, proposed by minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, mounted a Google bombing campaign linking ministre blanchisseur ("laundering minister") to an article recalling Donnedieu de Vabres' conviction for money laundering. The campaign was so efficient that, as of 2006, merely searching for ministre ("minister") or blanchisseur ("launderer") brings up a news report of his conviction as one of the first results.

In 2004, after the controversy that erupted in the Philippines over the allegations that President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo had cheated in the elections, the phrase "pekeng pangulo" ("fake president") was linked to her official website.

In the 2006 US midterm elections, many left-wing bloggers, led by MyDD.com, banded together to propel neutral or negative articles about many Republican House candidates to the top of Google searches for their names. Right-wing bloggers responded similarly.

In November 2006, a local environmental group on Saipan, Beautify CNMI!, decried the high PageRank of Saipansucks.com, a site critical of Saipan's social and political life, and the fact that anyone who searched with the keyword "Saipan" could find the website in the top-ten search result positions. The group published a plan to counter the website's ranking through a campaign of linkspamming via Googlebombing and text anchoring.

In January 2007, Google announced they altered their search engine algorithm to significantly reduce the effectiveness of the technique.

In March 2007, the Washington Post reported that Nikolas Schiller was able to Google bomb "Redacted Name" to highlight his website's block on search engines. Schiller is also accountable for being the first person to create Google Bomb for Google Maps StreetView feature. While not a link bomb, his StreetView I.E.D. is an animation that simulates an Improvised explosive device detonating on Bush Street in San Francisco.

In June of that year, the Google bomb emerged in New Zealand politics. Various online blogs in New Zealand reported the search term "clueless" on Google's New Zealand search function, when limited to New Zealand results, returns a link directly to the website of the National Party'sleader, John Key.

Commercial bombing

Main article: spamdexing

Some website operators have adapted Google bombing techniques to do spamdexing. This includes, among other techniques, posting of links to a site in an Internet forum along with phrases the promoter hopes to associate with the site (see Spam in blogs). Unlike conventional message board spam, the object is not to attract readers to the site directly, but to increase the site's ranking under those search terms. Promoters using this technique frequently target forums with low reader traffic, in hopes that it will fly under the moderators' radar. Wikis in specific are often the target of this kind of page rank vandalism, as all of the pages are freely editable. This practice was also called "money bombing" by John Hiler circa 2004.

A further technique is for the owner of an Internet domain name to set up the domain's DNS entry so that all subdomains are directed to the same server. The operator then sets up the server so that page requests generate a page full of desired Google search terms, each linking to a subdomain of the same site, with the same title as the subdomain in the requested URL. Frequently the subdomain matches the linked phrase, with spaces replaced by underscores or hyphens. Since Google treats subdomains as distinct sites, the effect of a large number of subdomains linking to each other is a boost to the PageRank of those subdomains and of any other site they link to.

On 2 February 2007, many have noticed changes in the Google algorithm that largely affects, among other things, Google bombs: only roughly 10% of the Google bombs worked as of 15 February 2007. This is largely due to Google refactoring its valuation of PageRank.

Quixtar's bomb

Quixtar, a multi-level marketing company, has been accused by its critics of using its large network of websites to move sites critical of Quixtar lower in search engine rankings. A Quixtar IBO reports that a Quixtar leader advocated the practice in a meeting of Quixtar IBO's. Quixtar denies wrongdoing and states that its practices are in accordance with search engine rules.