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'Online Poker' Googlebomb

Posted by timothy on from the good-or-evil dept.

Philipp Lenssen writes "The blogger community is fighting back, though in ways not everyone may like: they are Googlebombing the Wikipedia page on online poker for the phrase "online poker" to make it rank higher in search engines. "Online poker", along with "Viagra", "mortgage" and "debt", are keywords heavily represented in comment spam, which itself aims to boost the Google ranking for a particular site and phrase. The Wikipedia page is currently third in Google."

6 of 379 comments (clear)

  1. I don't understand by the_skywise · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Do they think that if they make the Wiki ONLINE POKER page #1 that nobody will go to the other 9 online poker page results returned by Google on the same page?

    It don' make no sense!

  2. I'm feeling lucky by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It goes to #1.

  3. Pointless by Superfreaker · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Google Bombing is used to get your one page higher, it doesn't do anything to the other sites' ranking except to the single site you may displace off the top 10 results.

  4. Uh, why? by EvilStein · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Yes, I read the article. This seems to be a "fight fire with fire" solution and is probably just going to make things worse.

    The stupid online poker comment spam *is* annoying, yes, but is Googlebombing Wikipedia really a viable solution?

    The Wiki didn't come up 3rd when I looked a few minutes ago (it was 5th) and doesn't Google specifically say "Don't do stuff like this!" in their help documentation?
    I hope this doesn't backfire.

  5. two wrongs makes a right? by mcguyver · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I can't see this as a good thing.
    1. Blog spammers will fight back at blogs - mostly innocient people who have nothing to do with this war.
    2. Blog spam can get wikipedia in trouble by violating Google's guildelines.
    3. The recent nofollow tag attribue will dimish the value of blog spam.

  6. I am all of these online casino bastards to die... by AdityaG · · Score: 5, Insightful

    but how the hell does this help? The online casino people are still going to spam your blog. Just because one link out of the 31 million pages wont deter a user. There are paid ads anyways. This is a waste of time if you ask me. A better way to combat this would be to come together to maybe come up with a plugin or hack to have a 100% system against spam.
    So the online casinos would be forced to stop auto spamming people.

    Of course this trouble will never end if these companies have like little gnomes manually spamming blog/blog rings.