Google officially blocks Google bombing

Angus Kidman
Saturday, 27 January 2007 01:22

Your IT - Home IT

Google bombing -- the practice of hundreds of sites linking a site and a particular piece of text to influence search results -- has itself been well and truly detonated, with Google updating its algorithms in a bid to block the controversial practice.

Google bombing is designed to take advantage of one of the few well-understood elements of Google's carefully-protected search algorithms: the more frequently a particular site was linked to using a specific phrase, the higher it would appear in search rankings for that phrase.

Bloggers could exploit this feature by agreeing to link particular terms and sites, often for satiric effect. The most infamous Google bomb saw the phrase "miserable failure" linked with US President George Bush Jr.

Google has long been aware of the practice, but until recently had not taken any public action against Google bombing. Now, however, it has confirmed what search engine experts had suspected for some time: its algorithms have been updated to minimise the impact of the practice.

"By improving our analysis of the link structure of the web, Google has begun minimizing the impact of many Googlebombs," Google engineer Matt Cutts wrote in a post on Google's Web master blog.

That represents a shift from the company's previous hands-off approach. "Because these pranks are normally for phrases that are well off the beaten path, they haven't been a very high priority for us," Cutts wrote. "But over time, we've seen more people assume that they are Google's opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Googlebombed queries. That's not true, and it seemed like it was worth trying to correct that misperception. So a few of us who work here got together and came up with an algorithm that minimizes the impact of many Googlebombs."

Given that there's an entire sub-industry built around manipulating Google results to attract traffic, new attempts at Google bomb-style tinkering are likely, a fact the company is prepared for. "We wouldn't claim that this change handles every prank that someone has attempted," Cutts wrote.