(Previous forum discussion: http://blogoscoped.com/forum/84051.html)

I suspect the change won't affect any page that has the target words on that page (including metadata).

I also speculate that the GoogleBomb can be re-ignited using associated words, i.e. link using "George Bush: Miserable Failure"

More theorizing:
http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/archives/001136.html

hehe, now are only sites on the "Völlige Inkompetenz"-page 1, which are writing about this googlebomb. :P

An easy way to return the "discussions about a google bomb" rather than the google bomb itself would be to give sites linking to google search result pages more weight...

what do you think?

In some cases though, I'd venture that the sites discussing a google bomb wouldn't be the most relevant results.

Take "french military victories" for example. Hard as it is to believe, they DO have some military victories. The more common interpretation of this query would be to show results pertaining to wars that france won. (unless of course you argue that the google bomb is the most common usage of this term... something I doubt.)

I'd agree by looking at the new results that they must have made some sort of tweak that took on-page factors into account, but shouldn't the algorthim have been doing this in the first place?

It's more possible that there's some sort of link text analysis. It's not very natural for tons of blogs to link to the same site all using the same text. (unless said text is the title or URL of the site, but that's also easy to check). I'd think looking at things like this, a googlebomb (or seo spam) would stick out pretty bad.

Garett – No, can't be that simple, because then the target would still be high in the SERPS (even if not #1).

The links with [BOMB] seem to not count at all, the site not ranking for [BOMB].

Let's not forget that with whatever Google tried to do, different bomb targets still *are* in the #1 spot... examples: President of the Internet, Arabian Gulf, or French Military Victories.
Hmm. As opposed to a googlebomb like the "Miserable Failure" one, these don't kidnap "official" pages though, but link to pages created for this purpose. Wonder if the Googlebomb defusement algo is weak when it comes to that approach?

Right.. that sorta goes to what I was talking about Phillip.

The kidnapped pages are likely to have a ton of varrying links, and then all the links that are the same from blogs. As a VEN diagram, they're 2 seperate circles that don't touch.

The pages created to be a googlebomb, don't have the varying links... most (if not all) of the links pointing to them are all part of the bomb, and thus have the same text. That sticks out!

I think words on the page is a likely factor, and the pages created to be a Google-bomb have the target words on the page.

The litmus test for a Googlebomb is whether the site in question wants to show up at #1 or whether other people are pushing it up. If a site *wants* to show up, that's SEO rather than a Googlebomb.

So from the examples you give, [Waffles] would be a Googlebomb, but [french military victories] would not.

IMO that's not the classic definition of a Googlebomb outside the 'plex Matt :) ... e.g. French Military Victories is often cited as Googlebomb/ Google bomb, and I would also call it that. I can see though why you'd only want to tackle the "negative SEO" type of Googlebombs, and not the "positive SEO" type of bombs.

Berlusconi is no more the italian prime minister... now is romano prodi.

When you look for "African Ingenuity" Googles asks: "Did you mean American Ingenuity ?"

Another from 2003 : "that asshole, Dave Winer". When I came across it (I think a week or two after the original post) the top hit for "that asshole" was the person that attempted the bomb, Chris Locke.

the original post is a way down the page:
http://www.rageboy.com/2003_10_05_blogger-archive.html

I commented on Matt's Blog:
"Ahhhhh … so my guess at the algorithm tweaks would be if the target URL has tons of off-pageoptimization for a certain keyphrase, but very little (or no) on-page optimization for that same phrase, then it might fit the signature of a GoogleBomb and lets look a bit closer at it."

which dovetails with what Seth said who has an excellent more in-depth analysis at ihs URL above.

An interesting GoogleBomb like term is "click here" which is probably one of the most common anchor text terms around. Ummmmm ... now that would be an interesting analysis if the data could be obtained – what is the most popular anchor text term?!? ;-)

I also wrote on Matt's blog:
"On a semi-related note (and perhaps a corner case for ‘ya), how would you handle the case of when the target URL is not spiderable (via robots.txt, etc), but you have information from off-page anchor text linkage to rank it appropriately for certain keyphrases?"

Agg, Alek, you beat me to it! I was going to bring up [click here] and how that unintentional Googlebomb still points to Adobe.

Also, IIRC, [exit] used to point to Disney, but it no longer does (however, [under 18] lists Disney as the second result).

Always have the way to make Googlebombs if still use link votes to decide pageranks.

I think use DNA rule to judge the content is better.

A, G, C, T, U can combine multi DNA. Use DNA tech, computer can judge who it is. We can take per keyword as A or G or C or T or U. Documents will have more items to combine. Per documents can have it own DNA.

So the Googlebombs will disappear after use DNA tech.

Philipp, it may be a fine distinction, but I wanted to explain why some rankings had changed and others had not.

Rodrigo Peñalba, that was a buggy spelling suggestion. It no longer suggests that.

Andrew Hitchcock, see my litmus test comment up above; the algorithm doesn't target cases like that.

So will Google remove the disclaimer on the Jew SERP?

What worries me somewhat about this is the potential for collateral damage. If a site has a large number of links that use identical anchor text, does it risk being mistaken for a googlebomb?

<< So from the examples you give, [Waffles] would be a Googlebomb, but [french military victories] would not. >>

And since the albinoblacksheep.com page for [french military victories] has the phrase as its title and in the page itself, I guess that's one main reason why Google doesn't see this as a googlebomb – the site definitely *wants* to be indexed for that phrase.

I think Alek's comments about "if the target URL has tons of off-pageoptimization for a certain keyphrase, but very little (or no) on-page optimization for that same phrase" would definitely apply to this phrase.

I call bs on fancy algorithms. The "great president" googlebomb is a misleading result and it still works. Likewise, French military victories is a misleading result and Google still returns it. They gave in to political pressure just like they did in China. I think they are cloaking their change in technospeak to deflect the hail of criticism they got for agreeing to Chinese government censorship rules.