I’m reading a very interesting thread over at threadwatch.org regarding the latest announcement from Google about removal of the well known googlebombs namely “miserable failure” going against President George W. Bush and “liar” going against Great Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair.
To give a bit of background for new readers, a googlebomb is a technique used to make a sertain page rank for a search term that is not on a page. I could for exaple try to rank this page for the term “click here” without the text “click here” being on the page anywhere.
Try to do a search in Google for “click here” and you will see that the website of Adobe.com is on the first position in the search engine’s results pages (serp). This used to be the case for the “miserable failure” and “liar” as well.
When you search for these terms now, the sites of the President and the Prime Minister are no longer on the first places in the serps.
What does this mean then? As far as I can see, Google has by this change in policy actively entered the political landscape in a much stronger degree than before. By manually removing these terms they are making a political statement -and I am not to sure if I agree that they - as a publicly traded company, should actually make political statements like this.
It sends a very strong signal to the public: “Don’t try to make political statements through the serps that we don’t agree about. We will simply REMOVE your opinions”.
So there you have it folks. Googlebombs are no more.
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