About a week ago, the Google Webmaster’s Guild (ok, Blog, but it sounds like a secret organization) brought back into attention the Googlebombs, saying that they have been defused after a prolonged and sustained effort from their dev team. The algorithm they came up with actually works… some of the times.
Not familiar with the term "Googlebomb"? Also called
a "linkbomb" because it’s not always connected to Google, it is actually a sort of a prank that has people attempting to cause someone else’s site to rank for an obscure or meaningless query, in an attempt to lower its credibility and create an overall embarrassing effect.
Ryan Moulton and Kendra Carattini both wrote about the way that they had dealt with the problem and about what they put together to be their "defusing kit." Apparently, the algorithm they developed worked like a sort of deeper inquiry, trying to match the words in the query to those on the site. In plain words, if it ain’t there, it’s not going to show, and that should usually be enough.
Philipp Lenssen of blogoscoped.com found an interesting Googlebomb still ticking: searching for "dangerous cult" will find the website of Scientology.org. This case is interesting because the site actually contains the word "dangerous", but "cult" is not there. And as the Webmaster’s Guild said that they weren’t looking for a manual resolve of any problem, they’ll be looking at some more work to come up with a solution. I would be the first to remove the result from the query’s search results page and then figure out what went wrong, but they seem to want to do it by the book.
Luckily, the bombs have been pretty much defused. Unfortunately for us, the solution to partly include in the "funny" URL that pranksters sent, in order to create one such bomb, words on the site means that they will still continue, perhaps at an unmodified scale. Long live the Bomb Squad!
