Google revently released a statement announcing that they have taken steps to prevent Googlebombing, this is the action where sites are found for some specific terms not totally related to their content for example ‘miserable failure’ would return the Whitehouse site, ‘liar’ would return the 10 Downing Street site etc.
This has been a problem with the results for a while in that they could be manipulated by using links and in some cases very few links. When asked why they hadn’t responed before the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog, responded by saying :-
“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.”
“The next natural question to ask is Why doesn’t Google just edit these search results by hand? To answer that, you need to know a little bit about how Google works. When we’re faced with a bad search result or a relevance problem, our first instinct is to look for an automatic way to solve the problem instead of trying to fix a particular search by hand. Algorithms are great because they scale well: computers can process lots of data very fast, and robust algorithms often work well in many different languages. That’s what we did in this case, and the extra effort to find a good algorithm helps detect Googlebombs in many different languages. We wouldn’t claim that this change handles every prank that someone has attempted.”
So the question from an internet marketing and SEO point of view is how this change will filter through the results. Will this have any effect on someone in their real estate internet marketing?
At this stage it is hard to say, but from what Google say there are 100 or so Googlebombs that they are aware of. If they are manually flagging them which they say they’re not, how are they picking up these spurious links that are unrelated to the site they link to and likely unrelated to the site they link from. At this point my personal feeling is unrelated may be very related to how Google is filtering so watch how your results may be changing depending on how relevant your links are.
Rob Parker is an internet marketing expert with Leaf Tech Web. Inc who specialise in real estate SEO. He has helped web sites all over the world acheive their internet marketing goals.
