http://www.pressdemocrat.com/business/columns/25sims_d1.html
2>Google bombing gives weblogs new influence
March 25, 2002
Navel-gazing has risen to new heights with the success of weblogs, which are
online diaries that mix important personal epiphanies with links to cool
findings.
And now an odd consequence of weblogs and the cross-links between them has
emerged. It turns out that webloggers have a greater influence on Google’s
search results than ordinary Web pages do, and the potential to manipulate
those results – called Google Bombing – is coming to light.
Google Bombing is different from Google Whacking, a fun little pastime where
you try to discover some combination of words that delivers one and only one
search result.
Google Bombing plays off the search engine’s methodology for ranking Web
pages in its results, specifically its tendency to consider how other sites
point to a page.
Other search engines have organized and ranked Web pages based on keywords
that the site’s author puts in meta tags, or by the usage of terms on a
page. But this is easy to abuse by sticking a bunch of unrelated (though
often searched for) terms into your meta tags, things like “Liv Tyler” or
“nude celebrities.”
Google figured out an intelligent way to get around this. A page’s ranking
depends on how many other sites link to it, and whether they link to it from
their front page. It also considers how many other sites link to those
sites, so a popular site linking to your page will do more for it than a
deserted one. Links are considered, in essence, votes. The more sites with
lots of votes themselves vote on your site, the better your site does in
rankings.
Webloggers, who post frequently and link actively to each other’s sites,
have figured out they can influence Google’s rankings. John Hiler, a
weblogger who has a Web design firm in Manhattan, wrote about these
so-called Google Bombs on his site, MicroContentNews.com.
Hiler tells of a weblogger named Matt Haughey who used the technique to
strike back at a company called Critical IP, which had called him at home
after mining his phone number from the central database of domain name
holders.
Haughey posted a message on his home page, “Critical IP sucks” with HTML
code linking back to his site. He asked other bloggers to take the code and
post it on their sites. When they did, Google interpreted the cross links
between these popular and frequently updated sites as a vote of confidence
and, with no human intervention, ranked Haughey’s site highly. Within 48
hours of him launching the prank, a Google search for Critical IP, returned
Haughey’s site as the #1 result, along with his headline, “Critical IP
sucks.”
As webloggers become aware of their ability to manipulate the most-respected
search engine on the Web, they’re sure to find other reasons to do so. Hiler
identifies four: humor, ego, money and justice.
I can relate to the ego factor: I have a strange sense of pride over the
fact that a Google search on “manpurse” returns a page from my personal site
as the top result.
I brought this up with a fellow I know who is an active blogger with a
fairly popular site linking to interesting things he’s found online that
day. When I asked what he thought of Google Bombing, he said he didn’t see
it as abuse, really. The weblog community, he said, is a collection of
really bright folks, and if they vote with their links, then what they’re
voting on is probably important.
I find webloggers bright and interesting folks, and I tend to agree with
them much of the time. But they’re hardly representative: like me, they lean
toward the geeky and they lean toward the left.
In that sense, they are no better (and perhaps worse) a filter on What’s
Important and What’s True than the editors at mainstream news outlets, the
traditional gatekeepers of information.
More avaricious possibilities loom: many businesses would gladly pay a team
of webloggers to aggressively cross-link keywords among themselves, with
links to that business’ site - a cost-effective form of advertising that
Google will have to figure a way to route around if it wants to remain
objective and respected.
Hiler’s point is that, even if you couldn’t care less what webloggers have
to say, you’re being influenced by them if you rely on Google.
