Why Google Bombing Doesn’t Work

Categories: Feedback, Social MediaPosted on November 21st, 2006

Some folks like Tuttle (who’s spearheading this), Scoble, and The Obvious are trying to manipulate the Google search results.

Background info
A defaming website against Martin Luther King (A great man, who stood up for great things) is gaining in search results. Folks are bombing (excessive and un-natural linking) to the websites they feel are appropriate.

While I disagree with the defaming Martin Luther site, here’s why Google bombing is hurting your cause

Google folks don’t like unnatural linking behavior, they may counteract this by making the links you’re bombing at a lower rating
You’ve just raised awareness to a website that I had not known about,

As a natural human instinct, I went to go seek this website to learn more.
From a marketing standpoint, that’s a win for ‘awareness’

Folks are less likely to Google Bomb to support a cause, than to link to a website in natural blog conversation.

Recommendations
Why not start a campaign blog against the defaming website, calling out all the problems with it. Use similar names and link to it a whole lot. Overtime, your site will be linked, ranked, and will show up in search results around the defame site. Then, we can link to this blog that tells the truth to overcome and fight this website. Also tag the websites in Delicious, leave notes on other sites pointing to the site demonstrating it’s a fraud.
This is a typical blog business tactic, fight fire with fire, rather than trying to undermine the ’system’.

Update Jan 26th 2007: Although a few months premature, I was right.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 21st, 2006 at 9:24 am and is filed under Feedback, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

I too did not know about that site and sought it out. A definite win for the that movement.

I think your recommendations are the way to go when dealing with sites like this. Google bombing doesn’t change the underlying issues here and that is what needs to be looked at.

Posted by Julio Garcia on November 21st, 2006 at 11:03 am

This has worked in the past however. For instance, there used to be a hate site at the top of the search results for “Jew”. Enough people Google bombed the Wikipedia article so that this is no longer an issue.

Posted by Jake on November 21st, 2006 at 12:38 pm

Good points. I wouldn’t do this in a business context. It probably would backfire. It’ll be interesting to see what happens over the next few weeks to the ranking for the search term, though.

Posted by Robert Scoble on November 21st, 2006 at 8:13 pm

Julio, agreed.

Jake, what makes you think Google didn’t manipulate it? They have a motto “do no evil”, perhaps they influenced it?

Robert…I’m sure you’ll make an impact, you’re below 20 in technorati and have a page rank of 8. sheeesh

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on November 22nd, 2006 at 5:55 am

Jeremiah, GoogleBombing does work on a number of levels. Along with the example cited, Google “french military victories,” “waffles,” “failure,” or “miserable failure,” and you’ll see long lasting examples of successful GoogleBombs.