An Inbound Links Case Study – Google Bombing
Google Bombing is a technique which takes full advantage of Google’s link policy. Knowing that more links pointing to a page increases that page’s rankings for the words and phrases found on the pages with these links, others, outside of the for-profit world have used this technique for other motives, often political.
Perhaps the most well-known case is the Google bombing effort carried out by liberal webmasters and bloggers that led George W. Bushes Bio page to rank #1 for the words failure and miserable failure. Accordingly, conservative webmaster and bloggers returned the favor by causing John Kerry’s page to rank high for the word “waffle.”
Since then, Google has modified its algorithm so that articles discussing and explaining Google bombing in regards to the intended target outranks the intended target itself. At the time of this writing, and article on Search Engine Land entitled “Google Kills Bush’s Miserable Failure Search & Other Google Bombs” ranks first for the phrase “miserable failure.” While this has quashed notions that Google was somehow in support of the Bush Google bomb, it has raised questions by some as to the extent Google ‘tweaks’ its algorithm.
Lesson Learned
Online political skirmishes aside, the lesson to be learned here is the power of gaining inbound links. Many if not most of these pages that were successfully ‘bombed’ contained no instances of the word(s) they ranked #1 for. What this tells us is that linking alone is powerful enough to push a page to a #1 spot. What it does not tell us however, is that on-page content and optimization are unnecessary. All things equal, the page with the better on-page optimization will win out every time.
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