Google Defeats GoogleBombs

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For years “Googlebombs” excited SEOs to no end. GoogleBombs were the ultimate proof of how easily Google’s algo could be gamed. Obviously, this must have been a source of some discomfort to Google’s employees, who have tweaked their algo to eliminate this phenomena from their results.

People have asked about how we feel about Googlebombs, and we have talked about them in the past. Because these pranks are normally for phrases that are well off the beaten path, they haven’t been a very high priority for us. But over time, we’ve seen more people assume that they are Google’s opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Googlebombed queries. That’s not true, and it seemed like it was worth trying to correct that misperception. So a few of us who work here got together and came up with an algorithm that minimizes the impact of many Googlebombs.

In essence, it’s doubtful they had much difficulty doing this. Basically they have to check the “target page” and see if it contains any of the related text from the anchor text of the linking pages. If not, they can eliminate the result from their search.

If nothing else, this shows us that Google employees spend a hell of a lot of time reading the same forums as all of us, and are aware of all the common issues that are spoken of. Now, if they could do something productive like make their actual ago find quality results, we might all be impressed even more.

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