Google Juice

mpawlo writes: "I guess it is time to start using them bookmarks again, since favourite search engine Google seems to be on the verge of Altavista doom and search engine chaos. BBC News reports of Google bombing (often referred to as 'Google juice' by the infamous Crackmonkey subscribers). 'The users have found a way to "bomb" Google to improve the rankings of particular webpages, and ensure a site is near the top of the results for particular search phrases.' There is also the sport of Google Whacking affecting your search results."

Comments

Re:How to Google Whack...

[jamie]

The idea of the sport is to type two words into Google and come back with exactly one page on the web that contains both of them. Not zero pages, not two, but one.

To make the game challenging, you can't quote the words (making them into a phrase). And they both have to be actual English words which Google itself recognizes (I think Google uses dictionary.com's dictionary, so you can doublecheck yourself there).

The more common the words, the cleverer the Googlewhack is considered to be -- few Googlewhacks use words you would consider "common."

Try it yourself, just think up two obscure words and type them into Google. If you get zero hits, you're too obscure, try again. Much more likely that you'll get 5 or 10 or 20 or 150 hits, in which case your goal is simple: get more obscure, until that number gets down to 1!

Re:How to Google Whack...

[Peyna]

Assumming about 3,000,000 words in the English Language (http://www.wordorigins.org/number.htm), then we get about 8,999,997,000,000 possible two word combinations (correct that number if needed.) So, I would say it is some time before that is exhausted.

There is also a somewhat easy to prevent google from picking up the posted whack: post it as an image.

Re:How to spam the web with links

[Codifex Maximus]

Sounds to me like the fix for weblog bombing of Google *may* be a fairly easy thing.

Google could use the same method of rating that they do now to raise the importance of pages to also demote weblogs in importance. A way may be found to determine if a page is a Weblog and take it out of the equation.

Slashdot could be considered a weblog. Any page that allows a user to post a message with links embedded in it is a Weblog is it not?

Let Google's Deja worry about the Weblogs and then the user can opt to include the extra results or not.

This is an example of Google working!

[sigmond]

This does _nothing_ to undermind the relevance of Google's rankings. When you perform a search on Google and the first "hit" is one that has been juiced in this way you are getting a hit that a larger number of individual sites, all of which are respected by other sites, agree is important to the subject. That is the beauty of Google.

Yes, this effect can be choreographed, but the result is the same. All of the sites choreographed to achieve this result are voting that site A is relevant to subject B. If the sites involved consistently show bad judgment their ranking in Google are likely to decline and therefore their contribution to the Google ranking for subject B will lessen.

The fact that a large number of highly ranked blogs can drive a URL up the Google pop-chart is evidence of both the respect blogs are given and the power of Google's algorithms to find such non-corporate backed content.

Re:Another article

[MadAhab]

Nevertheless, this is the way google is supposed to work; it finds content on the web. If the content is BBSpam'd press releases, then the folks running the boards will figure out how improve the quality of their sites by bitchslapping spam out of their house. You can't blame Google for accurately finding crap. If a bunch of people with popular sites want to goof on their friend, they can. If they do it to an annoying degree, their sites will become less popular, fewer people will link to them, and they will lose their ability to influence rankings. Otherwise, google is just correctly reflecting the fact that a lot of people want to say that so-and-so is a talentless hack.

It should be noted that direct links as advertisements could get a rebound under Google. Why pay for a link that bounds through another domain when you could have, say, Slashdot provide a direct link to your site and therefore give you a Google boost? Does anyone know if the link from a site gets you any Google boost if it clicks through, say, a redirect through doubleclick?