Google bomb - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The terms Google bomb and Googlewashing refer to practices, such as creating large numbers of links, that cause a web page to have a high ranking for searches on unrelated or off topic keyword phrases, often for comical or satirical purposes. In contrast, search engine optimization

Search engine optimization

Search engine optimization is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the "natural" or un-paid search results...

is the practice of improving the search engine

Search engine

A search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system. The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called hits. Search engines help to minimize the time required to find information and the amount of information...

listings of web pages for relevant search terms.

It is done for either business, political, or comedic purposes (or a combination of the latter two).
Google's search-rank algorithm

PageRank

PageRank is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page and used by the Google Internet search engine, that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set...

ranks pages higher for a particular search phrase if enough other pages linked to it using similar anchor text

Anchor text

The anchor text, link label or link text is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink. The words contained in the anchor text can determine the ranking that the page will receive by search engines. Since 1998, some web browsers have added the ability to show a tooltip for a hyperlink before it is...

(linking text such as "miserable failure"). However, by January 2007 Google had made changes to search results to counter popular Google bombs, such as "miserable failure", which now lists pages about the Google bomb itself. Google bomb is used both as a verb

Verb

A verb, from the Latin verbum meaning word, is a word that in syntax conveys an action , or a state of being . In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive...

and a noun

Noun

In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition .Lexical categories are defined in terms of how their members combine with other kinds of...

. The phrase "Google bombing" was introduced to the New Oxford American Dictionary
New Oxford American Dictionary
The New Oxford American Dictionary is a single-volume dictionary of American English compiled by American editors at the Oxford University Press....

in May 2005. Google bombing is closely related to spamdexing

Spamdexing

In computing, spamdexing is the deliberate manipulation of search engine indexes...

, the practice of deliberately modifying HTML

HTML

HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....

pages to increase the chance of their 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.

The term Googlewashing was coined in 2003 to describe the use of media manipulation

Media manipulation

Media manipulation is an aspect of public relations in which partisans create an image or argument that favours their particular interests. Such tactics may include the use of logical fallacies and propaganda techniques, and often involve the suppression of information or points of view by crowding...

to change the perception of a term, or push out competition from search engine results page

Search engine results page

A search engine results page , is the listing of web pages returned by a search engine in response to a keyword query. The results normally include a list of web pages with titles, a link to the page, and a short description showing where the Keywords have matched content within the page...

s (SERPs).

History

Google bombs date back as far as 1999, when a search for "more evil than Satan himself" resulted in the Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

homepage as the top result.

In September 2000 the first Google bomb with a verifiable creator was created by Hugedisk Men's Magazine, a now-defunct online humor magazine, when it linked the text "dumb motherfucker" to a site selling George W. Bush

George W. Bush

George Walker Bush is an American politician who served as the 43rd President of the United States, from 2001 to 2009. Before that, he was the 46th Governor of Texas, having served from 1995 to 2000....

-related merchandise. Hugedisk had also unsuccessfully attempted to Google bomb an equally derogatory term to bring up an Al Gore

Al Gore

Albert Arnold "Al" Gore, Jr. served as the 45th Vice President of the United States , under President Bill Clinton. He was the Democratic Party's nominee for President in the 2000 U.S. presidential election....

-related site. After a fair amount of publicity the George W. Bush-related merchandise site retained lawyers and sent a cease and desist

Cease and desist

A cease and desist is an order or request to halt an activity and not to take it up again later or else face legal action. The recipient of the cease-and-desist may be an individual or an organization....

letter to Hugedisk, thereby ending the Google bomb.

Adam Mathes is credited with coining the term "Google bombing" when he mentioned it in an article that appeared on April 6, 2001 in the online magazine uber.nu. In the article Mathes details his connection of the search term "talentless hack" to the website of his friend Andy Pressman by recruiting fellow webloggers to link to his friend's page with the desired term.

Uses as tactical media

The Google Bomb has been used for tactical media

Tactical media

Tactical media is a term coined in 1997, to de note a form of media activism that privileges temporary, hit-and-run interventions in the media sphere over the creation of permanent and alternative media outlets. Tactical media describes interventionist media art practices that engage and critique...

as a way of performing a 'hit-and-run' media attack on popular topics. Such attacks include Anthony Cox's attack in 2003. He created a parody of the "404 – page not found" browser error message in response to the war in Iraq. The page looked like the error page but was titled "These Weapons of Mass Destruction cannot be displayed." This website could be found as one of the top hits on Google after the start of the war in Iraq.

Alternative meanings

The Google Bomb is often misunderstood by those in the media and publishing industry who do not retain technical knowledge of Google's ranking factors. For example, Alex Jones creates "Google Bombs" every week by dispatching instructions to his radio/internet listeners. In this context the term is used to describe a rapid and massive influx of keyword searches for a particular phrase. The keyword surge gives the illusion that the related content has suddenly become popular, however it is artificial in nature because it is created by a loyal following of people to a particular media outlet, often alternative media. The strategy behind this type of Google Bombing is to attract attention from the larger mainstream media and influence them to publish content related to the keyword.

Google bowling

By studying what types of ranking manipulations a search engine is punishing, a company can provoke a search engine into lowering the ranking of a competitor's website. This practice, known as Google bowling, is often done by purchasing Google bombing services (or other SEO

Search engine optimization

Search engine optimization is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the "natural" or un-paid search results...

techniques) not for one's own website, but rather for the website of the competitor. The attacker provokes the search company into punishing the "offending" competitor by displaying their page further down in the search results. For victims of Google bowling, it may be difficult to appeal the ranking decrease because Google avoids explaining penalties, preferring not to "educate" real offenders. However if the situation is clear-cut, Google could lift the penalty after submitting a request for reconsideration.

Beyond Google

Other search engines use similar techniques to rank results, so Yahoo!

Yahoo!

Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, United States. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine , Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping ,...

, AltaVista

AltaVista

AltaVista is a web search engine owned by Yahoo!. AltaVista was once one of the most popular search engines but its popularity declined with the rise of Google...

, and HotBot

HotBot

HotBot is a web search engine launched in May 1996 by Wired Magazine. It is currently owned by Lycos. HotBot became a popular tool with search results served by the Inktomi database and directory results provided originally by LookSmart and then the Open Directory Project since mid-1999...

are also affected by Google bombs. A search for "miserable failure" or "failure" on September 29, 2006 brought up the official George W. Bush

George W. Bush

biography number one on Google, Yahoo!, and MSN and number two on Ask.com. On June 2, 2005, Yooter reported that George Bush was ranked first for the keyword 'miserable', 'failure', and 'miserable failure' in both Google and Yahoo!; Google has since addressed this and disarmed the George Bush Google bomb and many others.

The BBC

BBC

The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...

, reporting on Google bombs in 2002, used the headline "Google Hit By Link Bombers", acknowledging to some degree the idea of "link bombing." In 2004, the Search Engine Watch

Search Engine Watch

Search Engine Watch is a website that provides news and information about search engines and search engine marketing. Search Engine Watch was started by Danny Sullivan in 1996. In 1997, Sullivan sold it for an undisclosed amount to MecklerMedia...

site suggested that the term should be "link bombing" because of its application beyond Google, and continues to use that term as it is considered more accurate.
By January 2007, Google changed their indexing structure so that Google bombs such as "miserable failure" would "typically return commentary, discussions, and articles" about the tactic itself. Google announced the changes on its official blog. In response to criticism for allowing the Google bombs, Matt Cutts

Matt Cutts

Matt Cutts works for the Search Quality group in Google, specializing in search engine optimization issues. In an interview with USA Today in June 2008, Cutts provided advice on how to optimize search results on Google.-Career:...

, the head of Google’s Webspam team, said that Google bombs had not “been a very high priority for us.”

Competitions

In May 2004, the websites Dark Blue and SearchGuild teamed up to create what they termed the "SEO Challenge" to Google bomb the phrase "nigritude ultramarine".

The contest sparked controversy around the Internet, as some groups worried that search engine optimization

Search engine optimization

Search engine optimization is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the "natural" or un-paid search results...

(SEO) companies would abuse the techniques used in the competition to alter queries more relevant to the average user. This fear was offset by the belief that Google

Google

Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...

would alter their algorithm based on the methods used by the Google bombers.

In September 2004, another SEO contest

SEO contest

An SEO contest is a prize-awarding activity which challenges search engine optimization practitioners to achieve high ranking under major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN using certain keyword...

was created. This time, the objective was to get the top result for the phrase "seraphim proudleduck". A large sum of money was offered to the winner, but the competition turned out to be a hoax.

In .net magazine

.net (magazine)

.net is a monthly Internet magazine published in the UK by Future Publishing. Founded in 1994, .net magazine is published every four weeks . The magazine is aimed at professional and amateur web designers, and a significant proportion of its readers are full-time web developers. The front cover...

, Issue 134, March 2005, a contest was created among five professional web site developers to make their site the number one listed site for the made-up phrase "crystalline incandescence".

Political activism

Some of the most famous Google bombs are also expressions of political opinions (e.g. "liar" leading to Tony Blair

Tony Blair

Anthony Charles Lynton Blair is a former British Labour Party politician who served as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2 May 1997 to 27 June 2007. He was the Member of Parliament for Sedgefield from 1983 to 2007 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1994 to 2007...

or "miserable failure" leading to the White House's biography of George W. Bush):

In 2003, Steven Lerner, creator of Albino Blacksheep
Albino Blacksheep
Albino Blacksheep is an animation website made in Toronto, Ontario, Canada that posts member-submitted digital media. Most of these are movies or games created with Adobe Flash. The website also features image galleries, audio files, and text files. Additionally, there is a mobile section that...

, created a parody
Parody
A parody , in current usage, is an imitative work created to mock, comment on, or trivialise an original work, its subject, author, style, or some other target, by means of humorous, satiric or ironic imitation...

webpage titled "French Military Victories". When typed into Google, the first result (or the "I'm Feeling Lucky" result) led to a webpage resembling a Google error message, reading, "Your search – French military victories – did not match any documents. Did you mean French military defeats?" The page received over 50,000 hits within 18 hours of its release. Links near the top of the page led to a simplified list of French military history
Military history of France
The military history of France encompasses an immense panorama of conflicts and struggles extending for more than 2,000 years across areas including modern France, greater Europe, and European territorial possessions overseas....

. The only war listed as a win for the French was the French Revolution, in which they fought themselves. As of May 2, 2011, the page is no longer listed in Google's first few results for "French military victories", but several links on the list go to sites recounting the joke.

In 2003, columnist Dan Savage
Dan Savage
Daniel Keenan "Dan" Savage is an American author, media pundit, journalist and newspaper editor. Savage writes the internationally syndicated relationship and sex advice column Savage Love. Its tone is frank in its discussion of sexuality, often humorous, and hostile to social conservatives, as in...

began his campaign to define the word "santorum" after former US Senator Rick Santorum
Rick Santorum
Richard John "Rick" Santorum is a lawyer and a former United States Senator from the commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Santorum was the chairman of the Senate Republican Conference -making him the third-ranking Senate Republican from 2001 until his leave in 2007. Santorum is considered both a social...

made several controversial statements regarding homosexuality. One search engine expert has questioned whether this campaign qualifies as a google bomb, arguing that it was instead a successful new definition for a word explained by a website.

In 2004, Jewish writer and activist Daniel Sieradski
Daniel Sieradski
Daniel Jonathan Sieradski is a Jewish American writer and activist. He was the founding publisher and editor-in-chief of Jewschool, a popular left-wing Jewish weblog, as well as the weblogs Radical Torah and Orthodox Anarchist. He is also the creator of the synagogue listings and reviews website...

urged visitors to his blog in seo to link to the Wikipedia article for "Jew" in response to findings, first publicized by Steven Weinstock, that a search for "Jew" returned the anti-Semitic website Jew Watch
Jew Watch
Jew Watch is an antisemitic website that promotes Holocaust denial, and makes many negative claims about Jews, which include allegations of a conspiracy that Jews control the media and banking industries, and accusations of Jewish involvement in terrorist groups...

at the top of the results. The campaign was successful in displacing the site from the top result, although www.jewwatch.org still appears on the first page of search results. In the same year the Persian Gulf
Persian Gulf
The Persian Gulf, in Southwest Asia, is an extension of the Indian Ocean located between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula.The Persian Gulf was the focus of the 1980–1988 Iran-Iraq War, in which each side attacked the other's oil tankers...

naming dispute was the subject of a Google bomb by an Iran
Iran
Iran , officially the Islamic Republic of Iran , is a country in Southern and Western Asia. The name "Iran" has been in use natively since the Sassanian era and came into use internationally in 1935, before which the country was known to the Western world as Persia...

ian blogger named Pendar Yousefi.

Also, in 2004, a Google bomb involving searching "ladrones" (Spanish for thieves) on Google linked the SGAE website.

In France, groups opposing the DADVSI
DADVSI
DADVSI is the abbreviation of the French Loi sur le Droit d’Auteur et les Droits Voisins dans la Société de l’Information...

copyright bill, proposed by minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres
Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres
Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres , often known as RDDV, is a French politician, France's Minister of Culture from 2004 to 2007...

, mounted a Google bombing campaign linking ministre blanchisseur ("laundering minister") to an article recalling Donnedieu de Vabres' conviction for money laundering
Money laundering
Money laundering is the process of disguising illegal sources of money so that it looks like it came from legal sources. The methods by which money may be laundered are varied and can range in sophistication. Many regulatory and governmental authorities quote estimates each year for the amount...

. The campaign was so efficient that, , merely searching for ministre ("minister") or blanchisseur ("launderer") brings up a news report of his conviction as one of the first results.

In 2004, after the controversy that erupted in the Philippines over the allegations that President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo
Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo
Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is a Filipino politician who served as the 14th President of the Philippines from 2001 to 2010, as the 12th Vice President of the Philippines from 1998 to 2001, and is currently a member of the House of Representatives representing the 2nd District of Pampanga...

had cheated in the elections, the phrase "pekeng pangulo" ("fake president") was linked to her official website.

In 2004, kretyn (Polish for moron) and similar insults referring to stupidity were linked to websites of various Polish politicians including Andrzej Lepper
Andrzej Lepper
Andrzej Zbigniew Lepper was a Polish politician who was the leader of Samoobrona RP political party....

and Roman Giertych
Roman Giertych
Roman Jacek Giertych is a Polish politician; he was Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Education until August 2007. He was a member of the Sejm from 2001 until October 2007, and chairman of the League of Polish Families party.- Biography :Roman Giertych comes from a prominent family of Polish...

.

In 2005 an Estonia
Estonia
Estonia , officially the Republic of Estonia , is a state in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by the Gulf of Finland, to the west by the Baltic Sea, to the south by Latvia , and to the east by Lake Peipsi and the Russian Federation . Across the Baltic Sea lies...

n blogger led a successful campaign to link the word masendav (Estonian
Estonian language
Estonian is the official language of Estonia, spoken by about 1.1 million people in Estonia and tens of thousands in various émigré communities...

for dismal or depressive) to the homepage of Estonian Centre Party
Estonian Centre Party
The Estonian Centre Party is a centrist, social liberal party in Estonia. Keskerakond is a member of the European Liberal Democrat and Reform Party. It has the largest membership of an Estonian party, with over 12 000 members....

. The Centre Party's website still ranks first in the results for masendav as of 2011.

In the 2006 US midterm elections, many left-wing bloggers, led by MyDD.com, banded together to propel neutral or negative articles about many Republican House candidates to the top of Google searches for their names.

Also in 2006, Siedziba szatana (satan
Satan
Satan , "the opposer", is the title of various entities, both human and divine, who challenge the faith of humans in the Hebrew Bible...

's headquarters) was linked to the website of controversial Christian broadcaster Radio Maryja
Radio Maryja
Radio Maryja is a Polish religious, conservative, anti-post-Communist and pro-life Roman Catholic radio station and media group, describing itself as patriotic. It was founded in Toruń, Poland, on December 9, 1991 and has been run since its inception by the Redemptorist rector doctor Tadeusz...

.

In January 2007, Google announced they altered their search engine algorithm to significantly reduce the effectiveness of the technique.

In March 2007, the Washington Post reported that Nikolas Schiller
Nikolas Schiller
Nikolas Schiller is an American blogger, a prominent digital map artist in the blogosphere, a vegetarian, and a civil rights activist who lives in Washington, DC...

was able to Google bomb "Redacted Name" to highlight his website's block on search engines.

During the initial stages of the anti-Scientology campaign, Project Chanology, hackers and other members of an anonymous internet group Google-bombed the Church of Scientology
Church of Scientology
The Church of Scientology is an organization devoted to the practice and the promotion of the Scientology belief system. The Church of Scientology International is the Church of Scientology's parent organization, and is responsible for the overall ecclesiastical management, dissemination and...

's main website as the first match found when the term "Dangerous Cult" was searched.

In September 2008, John Key
John Key
John Phillip Key is the 38th Prime Minister of New Zealand, in office since 2008. He has led the New Zealand National Party since 2006....

, leader of the New Zealand National Party
New Zealand National Party
The New Zealand National Party is the largest party in the New Zealand House of Representatives and in November 2008 formed a minority government with support from three minor parties.-Policies:...

was Google-bombed with the query "clueless".

In January 2009, a successful Google bomb was performed against the site of the Bulgarian Government by a loose group of bloggers and forum users. It was discovered that by mistake, the robots.txt on the government.bg forbade the crawling of the site by indexing machines which allowed for Google bombing. The group linked the search term "провал" (failure) to the government site. Within a couple of days, the first search result for "провал" was the Bulgarian Government's site regardless of the search results language.

In April 2009, the website Smart Bitches, Trashy Books launched a Google bomb against Amazon
Amazon.com
Amazon.com, Inc. is a multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and...

in response to its removal of ´LGBT
LGBT
LGBT is an initialism that collectively refers to "lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender" people. In use since the 1990s, the term "LGBT" is an adaptation of the initialism "LGB", which itself started replacing the phrase "gay community" beginning in the mid-to-late 1980s, which many within the...

material from their ranking lists, Amazon citing it as "adult material". Within hours of its creation the page appeared on the first page of returned search results for the term "Amazon Rank".

In July 2009, Opie and Anthony
Opie and Anthony
Opie and Anthony are the hosts of The Opie & Anthony Show, a talk radio program airing in the United States and Canada on XM Satellite Radio and Sirius Satellite Radio. Since the merger of the two satellite companies, this is now called Sirius/XM...

successfully performed a new method of Google bombing in which a specific word or phrase is artificially raised in the Google Trends
Google Trends
Google Trends is a public web facility of Google Inc., based on Google Search, that shows how often a particular search-term is entered relative to the total search-volume across various regions of the world, and in various languages...

reporting. The phrase 'Rev Al is a racist' was made #1 on Google Trends for 07-08-09 due to the controversial comments made by Reverend Al Sharpton
Al Sharpton
Alfred Charles "Al" Sharpton, Jr. is an American Baptist minister, civil rights activist, and television/radio talk show host. In 2004, he was a candidate for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. presidential election...

during Michael Jackson's Memorial Service. "Corey Feldman
Corey Feldman
Corey Scott Feldman is an American film and television actor. He became known during the 1980s, with roles in the Hollywood films Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, The Goonies, Stand by Me, The Lost Boys, License to Drive, Dream a Little Dream, Gremlins and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles...

is Hurting" was also number 14 on the top Google Trends for the same day in response to Feldman dressing up as Michael Jackson during the memorial service.

In France, in July 2009, "trou du cul du web" (eng :"The Asshole of the Internet") returned as the first result the official website of French president Nicolas Sarkozy
Nicolas Sarkozy
Nicolas Sarkozy is the 23rd and current President of the French Republic and ex officio Co-Prince of Andorra. He assumed the office on 16 May 2007 after defeating the Socialist Party candidate Ségolène Royal 10 days earlier....

; in September 2010, the same tactic resulted in President Sarkozy's Facebook page being the first result.

In Iran, in September 2009, the phrase "ahmadinejad president of iran" returned a fake Google search page which reads, "Did you mean: ahmadinejad is NOT president of iran. No standard web pages containing all your search terms were found". The phrase which is suggested by the fake Google page, ahmadinejad is NOT president of Iran, is linked to a video explaining events happening in Iran after Iranian presidential election, 2009
Iranian presidential election, 2009
Iran's tenth presidential election was held on 12 June 2009, with incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad running against three challengers. The next morning the Islamic Republic News Agency, Iran's official news agency, announced that with two-thirds of the votes counted, Ahmadinejad had won the election...

.

In September 2010, 4chan
4chan
4chan is an English-language imageboard website. Launched on October 1, 2003, its boards were originally used for the posting of pictures and discussion of manga and anime...

users tried to Google bomb the phrase 'Robert Pisano MPAA CEO arrested for child molestation!', as a related action to DDoS attacks on the RIAA, MPAA and British Phonographic Industry
British Phonographic Industry
The British Phonographic Industry is the British record industry's trade association.-Structure:Its membership comprises hundreds of music companies including all four "major" record companies , associate members such as manufacturers and distributors, and hundreds of independent music companies...

(BPI) websites. This was in retaliation for DDoS attacks carried out on The Pirate Bay
The Pirate Bay
The Pirate Bay is a Swedish website which hosts magnet links and .torrent files, which allow users to share electronic files, including multimedia, computer games and software via BitTorrent...

and various other file sharing sites.

In February 2011, pro-life activists managed to make it so that the page for abortion
Abortion
Abortion is defined as the termination of pregnancy by the removal or expulsion from the uterus of a fetus or embryo prior to viability. An abortion can occur spontaneously, in which case it is usually called a miscarriage, or it can be purposely induced...

on English Wikipedia
English Wikipedia
The English Wikipedia is the English-language edition of the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Founded on 15 January 2001 and reaching three million articles by August 2009, it was the first edition of Wikipedia and remains the largest, with almost three times as many articles as the next...

was the second highest ranking result for the term "murder".

Commercial use

Some website operators have adapted Google bombing techniques to do spamdexing

Spamdexing

In computing, spamdexing is the deliberate manipulation of search engine indexes...

. This includes, among other techniques, posting of links to a site in an Internet forum

Internet forum

An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are at least temporarily archived...

along with phrases the promoter hopes to associate with the site (see Spam in blogs

Spam in blogs

Spam in blogs is a form of spamdexing. It is done by automatically posting random comments or promoting commercial services to blogs, wikis, guestbooks, or other publicly...

). Unlike conventional message board spam, the object is not to attract readers to the site directly, but to increase the site's ranking under those search terms. Promoters using this technique frequently target forums with low reader traffic, in hopes that it will fly under the moderators' radar. Wiki

Wiki

A wiki is a website that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. Wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are often used collaboratively by multiple users. Examples include...

s in particular are often the target of this kind of page rank vandalism, as all of the pages are freely editable. This practice was also called "money bombing" by John Hiler circa 2004.

Another technique is for the owner of an Internet domain name

Domain name

A domain name is an identification string that defines a realm of administrative autonomy, authority, or control in the Internet. Domain names are formed by the rules and procedures of the Domain Name System ....

to set up the domain's DNS

Domain name system

The Domain Name System is a hierarchical distributed naming system for computers, services, or any resource connected to the Internet or a private network. It associates various information with domain names assigned to each of the participating entities...

entry so that all subdomain

Subdomain

In the Domain Name System hierarchy, a subdomain is a domain that is part of a larger domain.- Overview :The Domain Name System has a tree structure or hierarchy, with each node on the tree being a domain name. A subdomain is a domain that is part of a larger domain, the only domain that is not...

s are directed to the same server. The operator then sets up the server so that page requests generate a page full of desired Google search terms, each linking to a subdomain of the same site, with the same title as the subdomain in the requested URL

Uniform Resource Locator

In computing, a uniform resource locator or universal resource locator is a specific character string that constitutes a reference to an Internet resource....

. Frequently the subdomain matches the linked phrase, with spaces replaced by underscore

Underscore

The underscore [ _ ] is a character that originally appeared on the typewriter and was primarily used to underline words...

s or hyphen

Hyphen

The hyphen is a punctuation mark used to join words and to separate syllables of a single word. The use of hyphens is called hyphenation. The hyphen should not be confused with dashes , which are longer and have different uses, or with the minus sign which is also longer...

s. Since Google treats subdomains as distinct sites, the effect of many subdomains linking to each other is a boost to the PageRank

PageRank

of those subdomains and of any other site they link to.

On February 2, 2007, many have noticed changes in the Google algorithm that largely affects, among other things, Google bombs: only roughly 10% of the Google bombs worked as of February 15, 2007. This is largely due to Google refactoring its valuation of PageRank.

Quixtar's bomb

Quixtar

Amway Global is a multi-level marketing or network marketing company, founded 1959 in Ada, Michigan, United States...

, a multi-level marketing

Multi-level marketing

Multi-level marketing is a marketing strategy in which the sales force is compensated not only for sales they personally generate, but also for the sales of others they recruit, creating a downline of distributors and a hierarchy of multiple levels of compensation...

company, has been accused by its critics of using its large network of websites to move sites critical of Quixtar lower in search engine rankings. A Quixtar independent business owner (IBO) reports that a Quixtar leader advocated the practice in a meeting of Quixtar IBOs. Quixtar denies wrongdoing and states that its practices are in accordance with search engine rules.

History

Uses as tactical media

Alternative meanings

Google bowling

Beyond Google

Competitions

Political activism

Commercial use

Quixtar's bomb

See also

News articles