Google Defuses Link Bombs - Google Defuses its Link Bomb
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On January 27, 2007, Google adjusted their algorithms for web search to remove certain listings from their SERPs, especially the famous "miserable failure" top two rankings. This was done after almost three years of ignoring the link bomb, apart from various posts detailing that the SERPs did not reflect their political viewpoint, explaining the mechanism behind Google bombing, and stating their reluctance to change the listings. Currently, however, searches for keywords such as "miserable failure" turn up news articles describing the Google bomb, with the terms "miserable failure" itself getting scant mention.
I heard about the defusing on February 2 on Search Engine Land. Since then analysts have wondered how this tinkering with the algorithms will affect Google's SERPs and other search engine listings. Google routinely changes their algorithms every six months or so, and the algorithms are definitely not open source (they are released every couple of months though), so not every one is privy to what changes Google made. From the way the SERPs look, the changes did not pull all the Link Bombs on Google's SERPs.
A post on the Google webmaster blog explained that "When we're faced with a bad search result or a relevance problem, our first instinct is to look for an automatic way to solve the problem instead of trying to fix a particular search by hand. Algorithms are great because they scale well: computers can process lots of data very fast, and robust algorithms often work well in many different languages. That's what we did in this case, and the extra effort to find a good algorithm helps detect Google bombs in many different languages." It's worth noting that not ALL Link Bombs were defused, just the really famous ones (and the image search bomb still works for "miserable failure"). The post continued with "Again, the impact of this new algorithm is very limited in scope...but we hope that the affected queries are more relevant for searchers."
How did they do it? One theory is that Google's algorithms are now products of on page and off page factors (multiplied together) instead of the sum of on page and off page factors that traditional SEO takes into account. So in this case a pure linking strategy, or a pure content strategy, will no longer work as much as linking combined with content updates.The problem arises now that if Google has started interfering with its SERPs (apart from just banning sites, which would have been strange in this case because the site in question did not actively participate in the linking strategy) what else will they start doing? Is it possible that they will manipulate their SERPs to delist certain sites, such as Wikipedia, which are so top heavy in the rankings that some people advocate going straight to Wikipedia when searching for information rather than Google or any other search engine? It sounds far fetched, but how far is too far? You can still report any "live" Google bomb to the Google Web Search Help Group (spoilsports).
Next: Why Google Defused the Link Bomb >>
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