The Power of Links and the Google Bomb

Don’t kid yourself — determination does play a part in Google results. This past weekend, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was Google-bombed for “miserable failure” in Google’s Hebrew results, just like George W. Bush is in English results.

The Google bomb is a way of manipulating the search engines to bring up “preferred” results (by a select few webmasters). This is achieved by hundreds, perhaps thousands, of websites that are linked to these political figures’ websites with anchor text that referred to the particular page (and the President) as a “miserable failure.”

Google (which occupies the only Sponsored Link for the “miserable failure” search result) explains these results and discourages against this activity. Google explains that its “search results are generated by computer programs that rank web pages in large part by examining the number and relative popularity of the sites that link to them.”

However, if nothing else, the rise of Ehud Olmert to “failure” reiterates the precedent of the importance of links. Link your keywords so that people can find you for your desired search terms.

How are people going to find you for preferred search terms if there are no links that point to your site?

Update 01/26: Would you have guessed it?  The Google bomb is dead.  Matt Cutts addresses the change on the Google blog, and Danny goes into greater detail on SearchEngineLand.  This shouldn’t devalue the importance of links.  As Matt says, this is an algorithm change that specifically “minimizes the impact of many Googlebombs.”