Google bombing

An example of Google bombing in 2006 that caused the search query "miserable failure" to be associated with George W. Bush and Michael Moore

The terms Google bombing and Google washing refer to the practice of causing a website to rank highly in web search engine results for irrelevant, unrelated or off-topic search terms by linking heavily. In contrast, search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of improving the search engine listings of web pages for relevant search terms.

Google-bombing is done for either business, political, or comedic purposes (or some combination thereof).[1] Google's search-rank algorithm ranks pages higher for a particular search phrase if enough other pages linked to it use similar anchor text. By January 2007, however, Google had tweaked its search algorithm to counter popular Google bombs such as "miserable failure" leading to George W. Bush and Michael Moore; now, search results list pages about the Google bomb itself.[2] On 21 June 2015, the first result in a Google search for "miserable failure" was this article.[3] Used both as a verb and a noun, "Google bombing" was introduced to the New Oxford American Dictionary in May 2005.[4]

Google bombing is related to spamdexing, the practice of deliberately modifying HTML to increase the chance of a website 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.[5]

The term Googlewashing was coined by Andrew Orlowski in 2003 in order to describe the use of media manipulation to change the perception of a term, or push out competition from search engine results pages (SERPs).[6][7]

  1. ^ Zeller, Tom Jr. (October 26, 2006). "A New Campaign Tactic: Manipulating Google Data". The New York Times (Late Edition (East Coast)). p. A.20. (Note: payment required, weblink goes to abstract.)
  2. ^ Cite error: The named reference googlebomb halt was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  3. ^ "Miserable failure - Google Search". Archived from the original on June 21, 2015.
  4. ^ Price, Gary (May 16, 2005). "Google and Google Bombing Now Included New Oxford American Dictionary". Search Engine Watch. Archived from the original on January 27, 2007. Retrieved January 29, 2007..
  5. ^ Gyöngyi, Zoltán; Garcia-Molina, Hector (2005), "Web spam taxonomy" (PDF), Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web (AIRWeb), 2005 in The 14th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2005) May 10, (Tue)-14 (Sat), 2005, Nippon Convention Center (Makuhari Messe), Chiba, Japan., New York, NY: ACM Press, ISBN 1-59593-046-9
  6. ^ Orlowski, Andrew (April 3, 2003). "Anti-war slogan coined, repurposed and Googlewashed ... in 42 days". The Register. Retrieved January 6, 2007.
  7. ^ Andrew A. Adams; Rachel McCrindle (February 15, 2008). Pandora's Box: Social and Professional Issues of the Information Age. John Wiley & Sons. pp. 122–123. ISBN 978-0-470-06553-2. Retrieved September 30, 2012.