The term itself goes by many names today; Google Bombs, Google Bombing, Search Engine Bombing, Search Engine Marketing Bombing, Link Baiting and Link Bombing. Regardless of the name however, it all refers to attempting to artificially boost the ranking of key phrases through the use superfluous external web page links. If you are seo expert in Melbourne, then you are already aware with the tactics of search engine marketing.
First Recorded Incident of Search Engine Marketing Bombing
First coined as “search engine bombing” in 1997 by Archimedes Plutonium in a Google Groups psychology discussion titled “Law and order on Net and Web”, it referred to the first recorded emergence of deliberate actions by certain individuals engaging in online character assassinations. Mr. Plutonium was targeted by rivals in numerous blogs where they made deliberate use of his name in negative reference, to the point where they ranked highly when anyone search for Mr. Plutonium’s name. One could also say this was the first known instance of cyber-bullying.
From Search Engine Marketing Bombing to Google Bombing
The term “Google Bombing” become the more popular term in 2004 as a result of an article by Adam Mathes (“Filler Friday: Google Bombing”), wherein he discussed a flaw in Google’s ranking system. Mathes was the first to make the general public aware that Google’s ranking algorithm (at that time), weighted in-bound links (links leading to a particular site or page) quite heavily. The more in-bound links a page had connected to a specific key phrase, the higher it was ranked within Google. Mathes was able to prove his information by getting a friend’s website (Andy Pressman) to achieve #1 ranking for the term “talentless hack”.
Search Engine Marketing – How Does Link Bombing Work?
Assume for a moment that a company desires to achieve a rank high for the key phrase “disability management” (for example). For the company to achieve this through link bombing, they could simply set up several blog sites which make use of that specific phrase, then link it to the company’s site. The search engine web crawlers then registers multiple instances of a single phrase as seemingly directly related to one single page, resulting in a higher ranking. Test results in the past showed a succesful link bombing could be achieved with only a few dedicated weblogs.
Why Was Google Bombing Successful for Search Engine Marketing?
Prior to 2007, Google, as with most other search engines at that time, content was considered to be of higher “quality” or more important the more times external websites linked back to it. After Mathes article, search engine marketing designers and companies began using the techniques to boost their page ranks. The success of Google Bombing was such that some companies ran SEO Challenge competitions to see who could achieve the highest rankings for oddly combined phrases.
Google Bombing Today is Link Bombing
As a result of the popularity of Google as a search engine, it is interesting to note that the tactics used to rank high in Google also resulted in high rankings within Yahoo, HotBot and AltaVista. Due to the fact that Google Bombing ultimately affected all search engines, the phrase has since evolved to the more accurate term “Link Bombing”. Since 2007, link bombing is a black hat search engine marketing tactic that Google and the other major search engines have worked to eradicate through continuous changes in their ranking algorithms.
Link Bombing is a Spamdexing Search Engine Marketing Pitfall
Spamdexing is referred to as any search engine marketing tactic that manipulates all relevant resources that are used in the process of search engine indexing. Link bombing definitely falls into this definition and as such, is considered to be spamdexing by most search engines.
There are many so-called search engine marketing “experts” who still promote the use of link bombing, but companies and individuals looking to rank well within search engines would do well to avoid this search engine marketing pitfall. To allow oneself to get caught up in the competition of page ranking and succumb to such search engine marketing tactics runs the risk of having the website removed from the search engines altogether.