Link bombing – Like Google Bombing but different!

In the good old days anyone could be a miserable failure even a certain G W Bush, today Google is more selective about who can be described in such terms. Back in the old days when Google was young and we well ever so slightly younger ourselves Google placed a large amount of emphasis on link anchor text, indeed some said (mainly the Whitehouse) to much. But lets go back in time to oh just a couple of years ago and look at the original Google Bomb…

Anatomy of a Google Bomb

Back in the Dark Ages (no not night time, it was earlier then that) A man could sell Viagra through the sheer power of links alone! What fun days these were, some bright spark realised that if your wrote an anchor link with text such as ‘Buy Viagra’ and pointed such links at your page its rankings increased for that term. Presumably one day our bright spark made a mistake and accidentally linked to the wrong page which did not contain the term yet it still ranked for the term. This got the bright spark thinking if I have enough pages with links pointing to a site with Anchor Text that all says the same thing I can influence what sites other then mine will rank for!

The Googlebomb was born

Now it is unknown if this bright spark went on to do untold damage but at some point a group of bright sparks we could call them a fire decided it would be jolly good fun to rank Microsoft for the phrase ‘more evil than Satan himself’. Lots of people claim they were the original spark here but none can corroborate their claim. Thankfully in 2000 a verifiable Google bomb was created targeting George Bush merchandise the creators Hugedisk Men’s Magazine the bomb, well if you want to know go do a search. Since then perhaps the most famous of all the Google Bombs has been Miserable Failure aka George Bush, bless he does seem to attract attention.
Googles response to this fun new sport urgh nothing! well not for 5 years then they put out a statement saying that it was very very naughty (I made that up they actually said something far more boring) By 2007 People were noticing some of their favoured bombs were going dud and started calling foul. Manual editing was to blame they said and when Mr Cutts (ah bless) declared ‘no no no its all algorithmic’ it sealed the conspiracy Google clearly did not want the people right to determine miserable failures for themselves!

Manual or Algorithmic

Early 2007 and something had indeed changed, while Google maintains it never hand edited any Google bomb (this is something for the foil hat brigade to argue over) the bombs were just going dud it would appear that you couldn’t rank people using anchor text of your own choice any more now the only way to maintain a miserable failure was if they used the term themselves! The world went very sad boo hoo

Introducing Linkbombs aka GoogleBomb2.0

So we can no longer GoogleBomb life sucks all the fun has gone but wait what this I hear you cry Scientology is a ‘Dangerous Cult’ oh my how did that happen! Early in 2008 (urgh now) A group of as yet unknown bright sparks decided that Scientology was perhaps a less then normal group and decided that they thought is might be a cult and or potentially dangerous. Ignoring if they were right (again for tin hat boys) the question is how did they do it?

Dangerous and Cult, remember I said Google wouldn’t let you rank for a term not appearing on your page/site well they probably don’t, but the Church of Scientology website has at least one of the two keywords active and both terms have been on the site in the past. The result a Linkbomb that bypasses Google bomb check, after all its using Anchor text which Google knows the group themselves have used sadly and at least for the Scientologists Google bomb check hasn’t quite gotten around to self awareness or indeed context. Could it be Google Bomb checker uses historical data? Wouldn’t this be a big hole?

Places to spam

For regular readers may know I have the honour of being ranked for places to spam, I regularly use companies that spam or are blatant blackhat (that get caught) as examples of how to use certain techniques. It would not take some one very long to develop a linkbomb ‘Tim Nash is a spammer’ or similar, would this hurt my reputation? Perhaps a little though I wouldn’t be that upset, your still sending me links and traffic while a quick look would indicate how you had done it. So who should be worried about linkbombing and why?

Reputation management

Most Reputation management is about removing unfavourable results from SERPs, a linkbomb by its very nature is attempting to rank your site (or your competitors) and if successful barring getting links removed if liable there is little you can do, well not quite you can of course manipulate the results yourself. Getting a company ranking for ‘company name sucks’ is a waste of time for link bombers the only damaging terms are degrading or terms such as in the Scientology case which cause an image in general public. People of course need to know who the company and or organisation is as well as the reason why ranking for that term is an issue (as well as the term to look for) so beyond mild fun linkbombs against a company will not normally harm the companies reputation.
Given that most linkbombs are pointless even if effective what would be the perfect LinkBomb?

Anatomy of a LinkBomb

How to write your own linkbomb complete with example;

• Select your target site which you wish to rank in this case we shall pick on WebsearchPR a nice company provide by Mike we shall from this point refer to them as the Clueless numpties.
• Visit the Clueless Numpties site and select suitable terms, this is like making poetry from fridge magnet words. Once you do it a couple of times you will get the idea – In our case we shall be aiming for “ethical my ass‘
• Add link and repeat, you will notice the nofollow as we know Google still follows such links we can use a nofollow and still get the anchor text assisting the other site. In our example I will only use this site so its a bit of a dud bomb
• Vary the anchor text and repeat to many links with identical Anchor text is bound to trip a filter so vary the word order add and remove words etc

Due to the fact my chosen targets are indeed complete and utter clueless numpties and their great SEO site is blocking spiders this will be a very dead bomb, but Mike asked for call to action so it seemed only polite to join in the fun
Update: So I was wrong Google did indeed fall for the bomb

So have you seen or fired a Linkbomb recently? please guys when commenting be aware some companies and individuals in this post might be upset that they have been victim to Evil malicious nasty (is that enough negatives?) pranks and so treat them with respect whatever you views of them keep it to yourself and comment on the techniques not the companies, organisations etc oh with the exception of clueless numpties that is.