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Hard to believe the big storm, or as labeled by local news outlets, "Ice Storm 07", is now two weeks past. I suppose I can't blame them, as the opportunity to "brand" the news is usually the purview of the national cable news outlets, and then only confined to the really big stories, like wars. After all, rarely does local news rise to "event level, brand-worthy" status.

Suddenly at a loss for a decent segue, we'll just swing right into the meat of this post, namely the recent announcement of an algorithmic correction for "Google bombs".

URL: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/01/quick-word-about-googlebombs.html

If you're not aware of what a Google bomb is, then you could always try venerable Wikipedia, or I could give you the short, short version. The basic idea is a lot of people link to a selected page with the same keyworded anchor text in an effort to get the target page to rank for the selected keywords. The primary point being these keywords do not actually appear on the page, thus, outside the efforts of the "bombers", the page would not ordinarily rank for the keyword or words.

The most relevant and well known examples of this are what I will not touch with the proverbial ten foot pole, as they are generally political in nature. You can read the Wikipedia article and figure them out. That, according to Google, was part of the problem. As the post from their Webmaster Central blog states, they were concerned the public was assuming the results to be a product of their own political agenda, and not merely the successful manipulation of their existing algorithms by outside forces.

Prior to the recent announcement, they had publicly commented that Google bombs would not be changed, since they felt changing results "by hand" was not the best solution to these "pranks".

URL:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/09/googlebombing-failure.html

For whatever reason, they refer to the bombs broadly as "pranks," even though some are, and some aren't. Enter the "algorithmic" solution. Whatever created the "tipping point" may never be known, perhaps it was merely a "back burner" project that finally finished, but the current "fix" for Google bombs is not being done by hand, but by changes to the algorithm.

Rumblings in the SEO community about this seem to concern primarily whether this change could be used to penalize competitors, along with the general conspiracy minded rhetoric about whether it is really algorithmic and, due to the previously mentioned "political" nature of many bombs, cries of censorship. Only the first really bares much thought, and it doesn't really prove all that fruitful.

In terms of the possibility to wield it as a weapon against competitors, it doesn't, logically, seem very useful. The point of most bombs is to rank a page for a term that it does not use. More likely than not, your competition is optimizing for terms they are, obviously, using on their website. They are, most likely, similar to or the same as your own optimization efforts. (Otherwise, they probably wouldn't be "your competition.") You're probably better off getting all those relevant keyworded backlinks pointing to you, not the competition.

This could feed into a larger discussion of other penalties, such as the theory there could actually be a situation where Google thinks you have "too many" backlinks and penalizes you for it. That's beyond the scope of a Google bombing discussion, though, as that theory revolves around the backlinks being relevant to the content.

The conspiracy minded have contested that some Google bombs are still there, challenging the idea this change was done algorithmically. Again, the political nature of many of the bombs seems to add fuel to this fire, just as it does with the censorship cries. The "click here" example is cited. If you search Google for "click here" (without the quotes), the top result is the Adobe Acrobat Reader download page. This was the case both before and after the "fix."

I have trouble lumping this under the umbrella of "Google bomb." Though it follows the general form (the words "click here" do not appear on the page at all), it lacks "intent." This is, at best, "accidental" Google bombing. There's just a lot of websites out there with PDF documents that have same link on them. It probably looks something like this:

"To download Acrobat Reader, click here"

"Click here" is just a convenient way to get the required plug-in you might need to view the content. The rest of the results for "click here" cover some of the most well known, popular media plug-ins on the net, including Quicktime, Windows Media Player, and RealPlayer. All of them are examples of add-ons that would be required to view content on a website; add-ons for which the site owner helpfully added a "click here" link.

Now, that being said, it doesn't really alter the shape of the discussion about whether the change was, ultimately, manual or algorithmic. I seriously doubt the algorithm is highly developed enough to sniff out something so classically human as "intent." An "intent-capable" Google algorithm may be the catalyst event for the Technological Singularity. (That one is a fun read.) To paraphrase Kent Brockman, "... I, for one, welcome our new algorithmic overlords."

I'm willing to drink the Kool-Aide on this one. I'm betting the sheer mass of "click heres" actually far outweighs even the most well known, best participated Google bombs, and the algorithm change wasn't severe enough to affect it. The modification "fixed" the most well known "presidential" Google bomb, but the resulting SERPs for the term in question are now a laundry list of sites that refer to the original bomb. Of course, those pages actually have the term in question on them, so Google's probably in the "job well done" camp on that one.

Finally, while I in no way, shape, or form give Google a clean bill of health regarding censorship issues, I don't think this quite qualities. Yes, you can argue the political nature of many of the bombs was "free speech," but the change in the algorithm did not remove anyone's ability to make those statements. Unless you want to argue the "bomb" itself was a kind of protected speech, and I just can't see that happening. Should Google be forced to preserve certain results, especially objectively poor results, because some people consider them free speech? No, they shouldn't. What's being called "free speech" is simply the result of manipulations of the algorithm that Google, until recently, did not think important enough to address. So long as the algorithm itself remains free of political influence, then you've got very little to complain about.

Besides, I'm betting coding politics into an algorithm is just as hard as coding intent. For now, at least.