Search Engine Marketing Blog: piloSEO

A Concerted Nuking of Scientology

There is currently a concerted attack against Scientology being waged by Anonymous. Their attack features a variety of techniques but the technique that I am most interested in is the Googlebomb. Danny Sullivan wrote about this over at Search Engine Land and it raised quite a bit of discussion there and at Sphinn. The main focus of the discussion is whether this is a true Googlebomb or not. IMO whether it is or is not a true Google bomb is less important than the fact that pointing a bunch of anchor text focused links to a site still pushes that site up to the top of Google (and only Google). For all the talk about multiple ranking factors in their algorithm it appears that Google still considers links the most important ranking factor.

Googlebomb?

First let’s discuss what a Googlebomb is. Matt Cutts spoke up in the Google Webmaster Blog explaining what a Googlebomb is and that Google has fixed the issue, claiming they will no longer work. According to that post,“Technically, a “Googlebomb” (sometimes called a “linkbomb” since they’re not specific to Google) refers to a prank where people attempt to cause someone else’s site to rank for an obscure or meaningless query.” So in essence if enough pages link to a specific page using the same anchor text that page will rank at the top for that phrase. The most famous Googlebomb is the “Miserable Failure” bomb that brought up the Whitehouse.gov page number one in the SERP’s. Yahoo was affected by Googlebombs in the past but it appears they have been able to fix the problem.

The “Dangerous Cult” and “Scientology” Bomb

The most recent Googlebomb is related to Scientology and it is a two pronged bombing. Not only are the bombers linking a negative keyword phrase to the Scientology site they are also linking the term Scientology to an anti-Scientology site. Specifically, they are linking the anchor text “Dangerous Cult” to scientology.org and they are linking the anchor text “Scientology” to xenu.net.

Here two examples of this tactic that I have seen on multiple sites

The purpose behind this is to not only push Scientology to the top of Google for the term “Dangerous Cult” but also to push Xenu.net to the top for “Scientology”. Despite Matt Cutt’s announcement that Googlebombing no longer works this bomb seems to having the intended consequences.

“Dangerous Cult” in Google

“Scientology” in Google

Apparently Yahoo was able to fix the flaw in their algorithm that allowed “linkbombing” to affect their SERP’s. When you run these queries in Yahoo it does not seem to have any impact there.

“Dangerous Cult” in Yahoo

“Scientology” in Yahoo

Not a true Googlebomb but a Googlebomb nonetheless

As Danny Sullivan discussed this is not a true Googlebomb because at least part of the targeted phrases appear on both sites. While cult does not appear on the Scientology site the term dangerous does. And the Xenu site has many references to Scientology throughout the site. Whether this is a true Googlebomb or not is irrelevant to this discussion though. The fact is that a concertated effort to rank a site for unflattering terms is still possible in Google. Apparently they have not been able to fix the flaw in their algorithm while Yahoo did. I still think Google provides the best results among all of the major Search Engines but this seems to once again provide information showing that no matter how many factors Google analyzes in their algorithm links trump them all. No matter what they say to contrary.

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