Detecting a Googlebomb

Googlebombs are pranks where a number of people across the web try to get a website to rank for a search term that it didn’t intend to (and normally wouldn’t want to).

These are often poking fun at high profile companies or political figures, for example Obama recently ranked for "failure" on Google.  Why would such a well respected new president have this bestowed on him?  Well as Obama took on the most powerful role in the world, the page was updated from his predecessor and all the links Bush had gained still pointed to the page.

The Googlebombers use the power of the "anchor text", i.e. the underlined text that goes into a link - this is awarded serious weight in Google's algorithm when calculating its' search results.  For example, Adobe ranks #1 on Google for click here purely because so many people worldwide have put up a link using that phrase to suggest people can download Acrobat Reader.

Matt Cutts, Google's algorithm superstar, has recently posted an article highlighting what Google is doing to defuse the Googlebomb phenomenon within its' rankings.  Firstly they run a detection algrotihm over their entire database of search listings (imagine how big that is!), looking for results that have been skewed by a potential Googlebomb.  As this is such a big job and a drain on Google's resources, they only run it around every couple of months.

Secondly Google will run a defusing algorithm to remove the problem.  This is run constantly, every time new web data is crawled.

So whilst Googlebombs have been great short term fun for a number of web hacks, it seems like Google has successfully stamped down on this and brought order back to its' dominant search listings.