A Google bomb is when a group of people attempt to cause a target web page to become the #1 search result for a chosen search phrase.

Every good Search Engine Optimization specialist tries to make his web pages become the #1 search result for the relevant search terms. A Google bomb is different, because it is usually a group of people trying to make a web page the #1 search result for an irrelevant or abusive search phrase.

The leftist loons used a Google bomb to cause President Bush to be the #1 search result on Google for the phrase “miserable failure”. The conservative goons retaliated by causing John Kerry to rank #1 for “waffles”.

In a slighty different variant of the Google bomb, the Nazi’s caused the term “jew” to point to one of their insane propaganda web pages.

A New Technique for Google Bombing

A new technique for Google bombing is to append the phrase you wish to bomb with the the target URL using the ‘#’ or ‘?’ operators.

Let’s say that you were trying to Google bomb this web page with the phrase “SEO dorks”.

You would build your Google bomb like this:

<a href=”/#seo-dorks”></a>

Google’s Response to Google Bombs

Google will likely not do anything about Google bombs, because they are a reflection of the way that Google is supposed to work. Each inbound link to a web page counts as a “vote” for that web page for the words in the anchor text. To Google, a Google bomb is simply hundreds or thousands of “votes” saying that John Kerry is a waffler.

Google Bombs and Other Search Engines

Although the name Google bomb has stuck, is is possible to mount the same sort of attack on any search engine, such as Yahoo, MSN, AltaVista, or AllTheWeb.

Search engine bombs are discussed in the context of Google more than other search engines for several reasons:

  • Google is considerably more popular than any other search engine
  • The Google search page I’m Feeling Lucky button makes Google bombing more “fun”
  • Google promotes the link popularity system heavily in their marketing campaigns