SES Chicago - December 7-11, 2009

March 28, 2008

Does Google Allow Good Google Bombs?

To some, it appears that Google has painted itself into a corner with its reliance on linking for its ranking algorithm. The lines between legitimate SEO, paid links, and Google bombs are becoming increasingly blurred.

One highly-charged example is the case of Jew Watch News, an anti-semitic hate site that managed to get top ranking for the query "Jew." Several Jewish and anti-defamation groups joined together in a coordinated Google bombing campaign to push that result down in the SERPs, and the results of that bomb can still be seen today.

In today's SearchDay, "Google Bombs, Jew Watch News & the Hypocritical Linking Universe," Marty Weintraub looks at that Google bomb, and tries to find where a Google bomb meets SEO, and where paid links fit into the picture.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 5:29 PM | Permalink

November 29, 2006

A Superbowl Marriage Proposal?

Joe Morin thinks he's got the next Million Dollar Home page mixed with romance going. To wit: someone named JP (to stay secret from his girlfriend) wants to make his wedding proposal in a TV commercial during next year's SuperBowl. Joe's hoping that somehow, search and interactive marketers can make it happen. Joe's post with details is here; the proposal site itself is here. Since the ads are all sold already, it's not a matter of raising money now but buzz to perhaps get JP linked up with an existing advertiser that might want to feature him. Good luck, JP -- and she'd better say yes!

I'll throw out a consolation prize that I know search marketers can do. Let's link over to the site with the words "will you" - like this: will you. Perhaps some link love will mean that JP can sit his girlfriend down in front of a computer and have her type that into Google, Yahoo, Live and Ask to find his site ranking tops. And if he sees it getting there, just change the title tag to read something like "Marry Me [INSERT GIRLFRIEND'S NAME]," and that's not a bad way to propose at all. Kind of how Barry did just over a year ago with Ask -- but this time without the search engine having to make it happen.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:01 AM | Permalink

November 28, 2006

Linkbombing Against Anti-Martin Luther King Jr Site

In case you missed it, there's a new link bombing campaign underway to try and reduce the rankings of an anti-Martin Luther King Jr. web site. The campaign raises all sorts of issues, ranging from those who disagree with the nature of that site and want it gone to those who might want all viewpoints represented in results, even if they disagree with them. Dropping Google Bombs Against Hate from Nicholas Carlson at InternetNews.com is a good overview of the situation with quotes from the major search engines. Doing down Martin Luther King from Phil Bradley gets into the issue of whether a campaign is bad despite the good intentions. Threatening librarians is a follow up from him on how failure to change some links might get a site entered into the "Skinhead Enablers Hall Of Shame." Do your campaign, hope people join with it -- but threatening librarians that fail to link the way you want that they'll be skinheads? That's overboard.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:31 AM | Permalink

November 13, 2006

Google Ranks Google Video Questioning Iran's Authority Over Tabriz

Via Valleywag and The Guardian, Iran is upset with Google over ranking a Google Video too high in the Google results. The video titled Tabriz - Azerbaijan describes that the ancient city Tabriz is located in Southern Azerbaijan, suggestion it shouldn't be part of Iran. A Google search on [tabriz azerbaijan] shows the Google Video as (currently) number one with a snippet that reads; "This video shows Tabriz, a city in Southern Azerbaijan, currently in the territory of Iran." A search for [tabriz] shows this result at the bottom of the first page or top of second page. Iran is upset with Google over this and feels that it is a US centric method of undermining Iran.

Postscript From Danny: To be really clear about how absurd this is, it's not Google directly suggesting that Tabriz is not somehow part of Iran. It's a description in a video that someone uploaded to Google Video. Where does Google itself think Tabriz is located at? According to Google Maps -- which Google runs directly -- firmly within the boundaries of the country of Iran.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:25 AM | Permalink

September 21, 2006

Bush Bio Changes For Miserable Failure Query Due To White House Change

Since 2004, a search on Google and Yahoo for "miserable failure" has almost always ranked the the official George W. Bush biography tops. Link bombing, as I've covered here, caused it to happen. But yesterday, folks at Threadwatch spotted that it has changed.

What happened? The White House moved the bio to a new page, which has caused the old page to disappear for that search temporarily. Now, at least for me, the bio is ranking tops again at a new location. The change is something a future president probably won't like.

The old page lived here:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html

You can see a copy of it via these listings at the Internet Archive. It was up since at least September 2001.

The new page lives here:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/

The old page uses a meta refresh command to send both humans and search engine spiders from the old to the new page. A fast meta refresh, to my knowledge, is treated by at least Google as a 301 permanent redirect.

Over at Yahoo, the old address is still ranking tops. At Google, yesterday the bio was completely gone. Today, at least for me, the bio is back up but at this new address, like this:

Why the change? My money is on the Bush Administration finally getting someone smart about search engines in to "solve" the miserable failure problem. The new page is a common page that potentially may be used by all US Presidents, rather than one specifically about George W. Bush. All those links making the old page come up will now make the overall page for ALL US Presidents rank well for that term.

Interestingly, this "overall" page seems to have existed nearly as long as the dedicated page to Bush, according to the Internet Archive. In January 2001, it hosted his bio. By September 13, 2001, it became an overview page, with his bio moved to that dedicated URL above.

Eventually, Bush will leave office, and so a dedicated page to him will return. This will likely be something like this:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents/gb43.html

That follows the naming convention of pages for other US Presidents, as you'll find here. It also begs the question of why it wasn't created, if the Bush Administration suddenly felt the White House pages about US presidents needed a shake up.

Interestingly again, if you visit that page, you'll see that Bush still has a dedicated page listed here:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/biography.html

Since that's actually his bio, the old bio more appropriately should point to that location.

Political games aside, Bush should have a unique page dedicated to himself, rather than making use of a generic page any US President might later encounter. The reason is simple. There are actually plenty of educators and other with no political gripe against Bush that might need to link to his bio or already have done so. This change fails to defuse the link bomb but certainly messes up many pages pointing at his bio with good intentions in the years to come.

For past coverage from us on this issue, see:

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 6:05 AM | Permalink

June 2, 2006

Reputation Management: How To Handle Saboteurs

The [failure] GoogleBomb had become well-known enough to have seen Marrissa Mayer post a response on the Google company blog last September. I first heard the phrase "Reputation Management" as applied to search from Heather Lloyd-Martin during a private conversation a long time before this. It was obvious Heather was on to something because we've all seen search results that produce unexpected listings. David Dalka recently posted his frustration that Googling his name could confuse searchers into thinking he is a millionaire. This may be a personal example, but what if you have a bona-fide saboteur?

Heather recently related to me her experience with a client where a saboteur took the client company name, mixed it with adult content, and auto-generated unsavory posts published across the Web in numerous blogs and forums. Needless to say, search results for that company started looking really bad, and at times, the whole set of results was flooded with what looked like adult listings.

Heather now regularly points out examples of big brands that could use reputation management as regards their search listings. She presents screen shots at conferences showing Google queries for uhaul and victorias secret having results at number 3 and number 2 respectively that read: "UHaul made my move a miserable and stressful experience" and "Victoria's Dirty Secret."

The dirty secret site has an image with an "angel" holding a chain saw. The site makes it sound as if whole forests are regularly depleted because the cataloger lacks environmental awareness. What can you do when this happens?

You certainly have little control over the natural rankings of saboteurs unless they spam. You can easily choose to hand spammers that polute your rankings over to search engine quality assurance teams when they use tactics that would have them removed. In the case of the dirty secret site, it appears the other extreme is occurring. The campaign for environmental change at Victorias Secret may be working. Perhaps Victorias Secret will establish more earth friendly contracts with their suppliers.

Other things you can do is publish pages telling your side of the story in the hopes to get natural rankings that counteract the negative spin. You needn't wait for natural rankings to appear either, you can purchase sponsored listings to drive users to the new pages straight away. At least in the meantime your presence can be felt on those most troubling queries should they begin to affect your image in search results.

Postscript: David's personal example caused him some grief. Consider the amount of grief an "eBay Avenger" causes the young fellow who it looks like fell victim to an angry buyer that decided to make an example of him. Even if the allegations later prove to be false, and although the eBay avenger has publicly offered to take down the site, SERPs for his name will likely be damaged for a long time to come, (Google, Microsoft and Ask too).

Posted by Detlev Johnson at 4:44 AM | Permalink

September 19, 2005

Googlebombing Now A "Prank" And Not Web's Opinion, Says Google

What's old is new again -- and apparently controversial still. Specifically, the entire [miserable failure] search that brings up the official George W. Bush biography -- a story from late 2003 -- has been resurrected and escalated to warrant a comment on the official Google Blog itself. What caused this and how did we go from that Googlebomb being the "web's opinion" to a prank? Sit right back and you'll hear a tale....

The original story of the miserable failure query is covered in my Google's (and Inktomi's) Miserable Failure article from January 2004. It talks about how a "google bombing" campaign in December 2003 involving at most a few hundred links caused the official George W. Bush biography to rank tops at Google and Inktomi (now owned by Yahoo).

I was kind of ticked at Google's response to comments over the entire thing. It wasn't that I felt Bush should or should not be there. It was that at that time, I did indeed feel there were more "legit" pages that might come up for that search, pages that were being pushed aside by the "cybergraffiti" of link bombing, as the New York Times called it.

Moreover, Google told the New York Times that the results for that query "just reflect the opinion on the web." I disagreed. A few hundred links weren't reflective of the entire web's opinion. They were reflective of a particular opinion on the web, and one being heavily influenced by the fact that an originally obscure term was being manipulated purposely.

If this had been the result of some type of active search marketing campaign -- say someone who bought a few hundred links, or a company that bartered such links, or someone who got the links through some type of link exchange program -- Google's response might have been different. Then it might have decided it needed to intercede in the results. But since it was chalked up as the "web's opinion," Google felt no need.

Why is this back in the news? My Looking At Google Bombs, But Not Very Well post from last week goes into this. In particular, this person earlier this month stumbled upon the fact that a search for [failure] on Google brings back the Bush bio at first, a slightly new twist but one already three months old. This person picked up on the post, noting that MSN lists the Michael Moore site instead. That got the attention of widely-read Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble, who posted briefly about it.

So new life was injected into an old corpse, and what an impact! I started getting email from people recently about the queries because they're coming across the older article I did. I assume Google is on that receiving end as well, since on today's Google blog, director of consumer web products Marissa Mayer commented on the query:

If you do a Google search on the word [failure] or the phrase [miserable failure], the top result is currently the White Houseï¿œs official biographical page for President Bush. We've received some complaints recently from users who assume that this reflects a political bias on our part. I'd like to explain how these results come up in order to allay these concerns.

Google's search results are generated by computer programs that rank web pages in large part by examining the number and relative popularity of the sites that link to them. By using a practice called googlebombing, however, determined pranksters can occasionally produce odd results. In this case, a number of webmasters use the phrases [failure] and [miserable failure] to describe and link to President Bush's website, thus pushing it to the top of searches for those phrases. We don't condone the practice of googlebombing, or any other action that seeks to affect the integrity of our search results, but we're also reluctant to alter our results by hand in order to prevent such items from showing up. Pranks like this may be distracting to some, but they don't affect the overall quality of our search service, whose objectivity, as always, remains the core of our mission.

My observations on this latest statement:

  • Notice what was the "web's opinion" in 2003 now becomes a "prank."  
  • Pranks, when not involving paid links or for some commercial gain, are apparently tolerated. Pranks involving commercial gain may be deemed spam and so threatening to the purity of the index that sites might be banned, be prevented from passing link reputation or other actions.  
  • Google has flat out said in the past they don't hand manipulate their results. What they've meant, as I explained in my Google In Controversy Over Top-Ranking For Anti-Jewish Site article, is that they don't try to manipulate what ranks well for a particular term. They do hand manipulate from the point of view of removing sites from their index for various reasons. This latest Google post is specifically about the manipulation of rankings, rather than site banning -- and it's noteworthy that rather than having a flat out denial, Google is simply saying it is "reluctant" to alter rankings by hand. That suggest that in some cases, they might do this. Realistically, I think this was bad wording on the part of Google. I suspect they still don't hand manipulate rankings, as they've long said they wouldn't do.

Finally, I've long called Google bombing instead "link bombing," because these so-called "Google bombs" go off on other places aside from just Google.

Indeed, a quick review today shows the Bush bio at the top of results for a search on [miserable failure] at Ask Jeeves, Google and Yahoo and ranked ninth at MSN. For just [failure], the bio is tops at Google and second at Yahoo and MSN -- no presence at all at Ask Jeeves. FYI, AOL's Google-powered results don't show the Bush bio because of specific hand manipulation AOL does.

Given this, I find it bizarre public relations, at the very least, for Google to be embracing the term "googlebombing" itself, since that implies it's a problem that only Google has, as opposed to the industry as a whole.

I'll stick with link bombing myself, but who knows, maybe I'll have to bend to popular pressure that will no doubt be further fueled by Google's own statement.

Postscript from Gary: Here in the U.S. it appears that Google is running an ad for the search terms [miserable failiure]. The ad reads: Why these results? These results may seem politically slanted. Here's what happened. A link to the Google Blog post about linkbombs is included. Here's a screen cap of the results page and ad.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:53 AM | Permalink

September 13, 2005

Looking At Google Bombs, But Not Very Well

Spotted via Phil Bradley, Deconstructing Google bombs from First Monday tries to analyze two link bombs to determine how much they are a result of collective action. Sadly, stumbles leave me less than thrilled with the paper and the supposed peer review process that's supposed to catch errors.

For one, "The coining of the phrase 'Google bomb' " didn't lead to the "mimetic diffusion of the rank influencing techniques...now referred to as search engine optimization." Link building and SEO existed before the notion of Google, much less Google bombs.

More important, the deconstruction of 2,690 links to George W. Bush bio page relating to the infamous miserable failure query sounds good and results in nice stats like 43 percent are from .gov sites and "legit" while another 43 percent are from link bombing participants. The problem is, Google only reports a slice of whatever links point at a particular page.

Go over to MSN Search, and it has nearly 30,000 links point at that page. Google certainly knows of around this many and uses them as part of the ranking process. It simply doesn't report them all, as any experience search marketer knows. The analysis is skewed by not taking that into account. It operates using partial data.

This is from "peer-reviewed" First Monday? I spotted one major factual error and one major flaw to the analysis within a minute that apparently got past whatever the peer review committee is. Memo to First Monday. Get some search experts and search marketers to do some of your reviewing when running papers about search.

In related news, the fact that just [failure] will bring up the George W. Bush bio on Google is still apparently news to some, which got the attention of Robert Scoble who pondered MSN coming up with "conservative" results for that query, Hillary Clinton ranking tops there, Bush coming in second. Variation on a Theme: A New George Bush Linkbomb? from Gary in June covers an earlier report of a search on [failure] bringing up Bush tops at Google and Yahoo and Gigablast. On MSN, he was eight. On Ask Jeeves, he didn't appear at all.

Finally, why do I keep saying "link bomb" and "link bombing" rather than "Google bomb" and "Google bombing?" It's more accurate, since as I've written, these bombs go off on places other that Google.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:31 AM | Permalink

June 5, 2005

Variation on a Theme: A New George Bush Linkbomb?

Poltics aside, the classic "linkbomb" continues to tell us that President G. W. Bush is a "miserable failure." Today, I spotted this blog post that notes that Mr. Bush is now not only a miserable failure but also just a "failure." That's right, the search for only the word "failure" returns his WhiteHouse.gov bio page in the number one position at Google, Yahoo, and Gigablast.

Elsewhere: + Ask Jeeves White House Bio Page NOT in first 10 results. The bio page is in the top 10 results for "miserable failure."

+ MSN Search White House Bio Page appears as 8th result.

Btw, if this is old news my apologies. I must have missed it.

Postscript: The word "miserable" by itself also returns the Bush bio page as the number one result at Google, Yahoo, and Gigablast. At MSN Search, the Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton page is the number one result. At Jeeves, Bush bio is number 6 while Clinton bio is number nine. Hat tip to SEW Blog reader Craig for the tip.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:02 PM | Permalink

May 16, 2005

Google and Google Bombing Now Included New Oxford American Dictionary

A brand-new edition of the "classic" New Oxford American Dictionary was released today and includes over 2,000 new words. Among the new words added to the dictionary are Google and Google Bombing. I've posted a complete list with all of the new entries and definitions over on my ResourceShelf site.

+ goo·gle /ˈgoōgəl/ (also Goo·gle) • v. informal [intrans.] use an Internet search engine, particularly Google.com: she spent the afternoon googling aimlessly. ∎ [trans.] search for the name of (someone) on the Internet to find out information about them: you meet someone, swap numbers, fix a date, then Google them through 1,346,966,000 Web pages. ORIGIN: from Google, the proprietary name of a popular Internet search engine.

+ goo·gle bomb·ing • n. the activity of designing Internet links that will bias search engine results so as to create an inaccurate impression of the search target. DERIVATIVES: google bomb n.google-bomb v. [trans.]

Posted by Gary Price at 6:42 PM | Permalink

May 12, 2005

Online Poker Searches Not Driving Wikipedia Popularity

Recent news from competitive intelligence and analytics firm Hitwise that the community-created Wikipedia encyclopedia saw a rise in popularity over the past month got me thinking. Did this have more to do with a link bombing campaign by some bloggers to push Wikipedia into the top results for "online poker" at Google? After some checking, Hitwise says that's not the case.

The story now posted for Search Engine Watch members goes into depth about why bloggers want Wikipedia to do well for online poker and how stats show the campaign isn't behind Wikipedia's rise in general popularity. Plus, a look at who is doing tops for searches on online poker and the surprising top search term that's sending Wikipedia traffic.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 3:17 PM | Permalink

March 10, 2005

Bush "Miserable Failure" Bio Turns Link-Only On Google

File this under interesting but perhaps nothing, big on the perhaps nothing part. I was checking on the infamous miserable failure search today that has long brought up the official George W. Bush bio in top position. I was surprised to see on Google that while the page is still listed there, it's a "link-only" or what Google calls a "partially-indexed" listing that doesn't show a title or description.

What's that? That's when a page hasn't actually been spidered by Google but ranks solely based on the links pointing at it. Google has long spidered this page, so why did it suddenly change to link-only since I last looked about two weeks ago?

The first thought is that the White House web site has banned spidering of this page, especially given its past history of trying to keep some content out of search engines (see my The US White House & Blocking Search Engines article for more on this). But checking the robots.txt file at the site, I don't see any such banning. Nor do I see any on-page use of the meta robots tag to keep the page out. In addition, you can see that Yahoo, MSN and Ask Jeeves are still listing it, evidenced by their cached copies (Yahoo, MSN, Ask).

Chances are, it's just a glitch with Google. For whatever reason, it may have dropped the page, as can happen from time-to-time. There's a slight chance that the White House could be specifically spotting the Google spider and specifically giving it on-page banning instructions, however. I haven't had a chance to investigate this more and can't stress enough that in all likelihood, this is some Google spidering glitch. Regardless, the fact the page isn't indexed has had no impact on the ranking.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:56 AM | Permalink

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