In other news, clearly, the time format on my Google Reader must be set to 2004.

Thanks to a find over at Reddit, via Boing Boing, the war about who’s right concerning the concept of abortion has selected Google’s search results as one of its battlegrounds.  It should be noted this publication or post is picking a side; instead, the idea that Googlebombs are still effective is our focus.

As for the Googlebomb in question, if a user searches the term “murder,” the second search result is the Wikipedia page for “abortion,” and the process behind a successful Googlebomb is the suspected reason for the ranking.  As of 10:00am EST, the result remains unchanged in Lexington, Ky.

Obviously, content farms were not used during the construction of this particular bomb.

Over at the Reddit thread, members are calling for action with the intent of altering the current rank distribution, with another group discussing how Googlebombs are developed, which brings us back to square one:

Googlebombs?  Really?

WebProNews reported about the phenomenon in 2004 when Jewish activists worked to “remove” an anti-Semitic site from results for the term “Jew." In January, 2007, Google’s own Webmaster blog discussed how algorithm changes would reduce their effectiveness.  Granted, Google’s explanation about what they changed was as clear as mud, but this is a topic they themselves addressed, and they even asking users to voice concerns or report suspected bombs at their Web Search Help Group.

Four years later, and despite Google’s algorithm alterations, Googlebombs are still an effective way to get your message across. 

Who knows?  Maybe they abandoned their previous algorithm alterations in favor of punishing content farms.

Of couse, Googlebombs don’t exactly work that quickly, so no, that’s not what happened.  Either those algorithm changes weren’t as effective; or, the more likely scenario, those who executed the “abortion/murder” bomb were a little more savvy than their predecessors.  If quality links are preferred over a brute force-like backlink overload, perhaps these bombers spent some time improving the quality of their individual sites before ganging up on Google’s susceptible algorithm.

Whatever the strategy used to get the “abortion” search result ranked higher, now that Reddit is involved, it’s doubtful it will end here.  The question is, how long before Google steps in and declares — again — that Googlebombs will no longer be an effective tool for manipulating their rankings?

Considering the nuclear blast they just directed at content farms, Google’s almost required to address this situation, too.

Type "dangerous cult" into Google and you’ll likely see, until Google disables it, that Scientology.org is the top result.

A year ago, Google’s spamfighters took measures to prevent Internet users from manipulating the search results via googlebombing, which involves mass-linking to a website with specific anchor text. The most famous examples of googlebombing include the White House website as the number one result for "miserable failure" and Senator John Kerry’s site as the number one result for "waffle."

Now, according to Google’s results, Scientology is a dangerous cult, and we should hope for Google’s and sanity’s sake the hypersensitive church doesn’t sue for defamation, though few would put it past them.

It’s difficult to tell who’s behind the googlebomb, but the odds-on favorite is likely a group called Anonymous, labeled by some as hackers with an axe to grind. The group has posted videos on YouTube, and messages around the Net protesting Scientology and waging a kind of cyber war against it.

One message called for Londoners to meet outside Scientology’s British HQ for a storming of the Bastille, so to speak. Doubtlessly, Scientologists will get little sympathy from Germany, where lawmakers proposed a ban of the religion.   
 

Update: A reader points out that a December 2007 report from the Associated Press was incorrect about the German government taking measures to ban the religion of Scientology.The AP issued the correction on January 2, and though it retracted some of the previous assertions, reasserted that parts of the government were gathering evidence against the church with the aim of a ban.

If you do a Google search on the word [failure] or the phrase [miserable failure], the top result is currently the White House’s 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.

Has Google admitted defeat?

Comments

Tag:

Colbert Sets Off Googlebomb

A large portion of the SEO community had a hand in shaping these results (which lead to ColbertNation.com).  As Search Engine Watch’s Greg Jarboe reported, "It all started at Search Engine Strategies last week, when Jonah Stein of The Alchemy of Search attended a taping of The Colbert Report . . ."

Colbert apparently suggested associating his name with the "giant brass balls" search term; the comedian’s diehard fans seem to have made him the "greatest living American" without any prompting.  And – if we assume that everyone who covered the story is a fan – that fan base includes such SEO notables as Rand Fishkin, Andy Beal, and Todd Malicoat, among others.

Still, we may be looking at the tail end of this rush of Colbert-related hoopla; Jarboe concluded his article by "[hoping] that this little blogstorm has run its course."  Other onlookers, such as CNET’s Caroline McCarthy, feel that Google itself may intervene.

"Google might have to invent a new ‘algorithm’ specifically for Colbert," she wrote.  And yet, in reference to the man who now has his own flavor of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, McCarthy adds, "Unfortunately, that’d probably just inflate his ego even more."

Come now.  The man’s the "greatest living American"; he’s allowed to be a bit prideful.

In case you’re not familiar with the term, a Googlebomb attempts to influence the search ranking of a page in conjunction with a particular query. Abd El-Fatah’s supporters hope to bring his plight to the awareness of anyone who googles Egypt.

As written on Wikipedia: “Alaa Abd El-Fatah . . . is a prominent Egyptian blogger, software developer, and democracy activist. He is known for co-founding (along with wife Manal) the Egyptian blog aggregator Manalaa’. . . .

“On Sunday, May 7, 2006, Abd El-Fatah was arrested during a peaceful protest which spoke out on behalf of an independent Egyptian judiciary. His arrest, along with that of several other bloggers and democracy activists, spurred a protest by others around the world, some of whom created a new blog, Free Alaa,’ devoted to calling for his release from jail.”

If you want to link directly to the blog (rather than google Egypt and see what happens), you can do so here.

Add to | DiggThis | Yahoo! My Web

Technorati:

Doug is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest eBusiness news.

A large contingent of the Jewish community was troubled by this and informed Google by way of petitions, and in one case a Googlebomb that moved JewWatch out of the first place in favor of Wikipedia.com, a Jewish historical site.

Throughout this time period, Google executives maintained stances of “search results reflect site popularity” and “Google does not manually alter search listings.” The company went as far to add an AdWord-style disclaimer at the top of the Jew keyword results page, stating that they too are troubled by the results, but reiterated that the company does not manually change search results.

Then, Friday 04/23/04 happened.

Apparently, something occurred over the weekend that appears to differ with Google’s stances. As of Friday, April 23, 2004, 6pm EST, the “Jew” keyword search brought a completely different set of search results.

Wikipedia.com holds the first position, doing exactly what its Googlebomb was designed to do, BUT, JewWatch is nowhere to be found. The controversial site is not on ANY of Google’s result pages for this particular keyword.

Thanks to SearchEngineWatch.com, some light has been shed on this situation. To read a thorough list of details about this issue, please check out Danny Sullivan’s superb article.

Danny was the first person to report JewWatch was no longer listed in the keyword results. His initial investigation actually found that the entire site was gone from Google’s index, although 175 pages of the site was found using the UK’s version of Google.

Looking for reasons why JewWatch showed up in results for foreign countries led Sullivan to two conclusions: the site had been removed from Google’s index manually and hadn’t updated the computers that serve European queries, or, Google removed the site from US searches for what could be legal reasons and let it stay on non-US searches.

The reason Google cited for JewWatch’s disappearance was that the site was down. This was confirmed by tripias.com, a blog maintained by Arthur Guray. “Apparently, the reason Jew Watch dropped from Google’s index is because their previous ISP had pulled them, and they were offline for a few days.” JewWatch was indeed down from April 16 to April 22, while they switched ISPs.

A quote from Google spokesman David Crane summarized the company’s position:

“Google did not blacklist or make any other manual change to intentionally remove the jewwatch.com website from our index. It does not currently appear in Google’s search results because the website was offline for a number of days last week. In our most recent crawl of the web, we were unable to reach the jewwatch.com website, therefore it was not included in our index. Now that the site is back up again, it’s likely that at some point soon, jewwatch.com will re-appear in Google. You’ll also find related information about the jewwatch.com website being taken offline here: http://www.removejewwatch.com.”

As of today, April 26, 2004, JewWatch is listed on Google, but not in search results for the “Jew” keyword. One obvious omission from JewWatch search results is the lack of an index page appearing on the results.

Sullivan offers an explanation, “When the entire site went down, Google may have tried to revisit the home page and couldn’t find it. This could have led to the home page being dropped. While the page was technically gone, Google could still see active links to it. Meanwhile, since the internal pages hadn’t been revisited, Google never noticed they were offline. They remained in the index.”

Google claims this is a “natural consequence of the site being down.” But if that is indeed the case, why do 175 pages of the site show up when searched, but not the index page? If the other pages have returned and/or were cached, shouldn’t the index page be showing up also?

Only Google knows for sure.

WebProNews | Breaking eBusiness News
Your source for investigative ebusiness reporting and breaking news.

Daniel Sieradski, editor of Jew School, a Web site dedicated to Jewish fringe culture, has spearheaded a Googlebomb designed to knock JewWatch.com out of the first place. Yesterday, the top listing for the keyword was Wikipedia.org, a reference page devoted to the definition of the word “Jew”.

As of today, JewWatch.com is back atop the results listings page. Undoubtedly spearheaded by another Googlebomb designed to keep this fight going. As stated before, Google does not change listings, unless regional laws dictate.

This fight for the top position doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon.

WebProNews | Breaking eBusiness News
Your source for investigative ebusiness reporting and breaking news.

Search engine watchdog Daniel Brandt has aimed his current Googlebomb directly at the source: Google’s executives. Brandt’s bomb, which you see by searching the phrase “out of touch executives”, in quotes, directs you to the Google executive branch web page.

His bomb was executed by featuring the link “Help end Google Bombs. Send a message to out-of-touch executives” on only five of his domains. By doing this, he moved the Google exec page to the top of the search results for the phrase used in the bombing.

Brandt is doing this to show the Google brain trust how easy it is to manipulate search results. Talking to The Register, Brandt said, “Google should not use terms in external links to boost the rank of a page on those terms, unless those terms are on the page itself. This is a no-brainer. But it means another CPU cycle per link, which is why Google won’t do it.”

WebProNews | Breaking eBusiness News
Your source for investigative ebusiness reporting and breaking news.