Google Defuses Googlebombs

John C. Worsley writes "Google announced today a modification to their search algorithm that minimizes well-known googlebombing exploits. Searches on 'miserable failure' and their ilk no longer bring up political targets. The Google blogger writes: 'By improving our analysis of the link structure of the web, Google has begun minimizing the impact of many Googlebombs. Now we will typically return commentary, discussions, and articles about the Googlebombs instead.'"

Comments

Re:Big changes?

[Anonymous Coward]

I did a search for google, and the snippet that comes up under each google entry does not exist on the page itself, where does it actually come from? It comes from googles' listings at dmoz.org

Re:Big changes?

[Simetrical]

Are you saying that bots are getting different search results than users? Because absolute shitloads of websites serve different versions of their pages to google for a wide variety of reasons. For example some premium sites allow google to index part of their content in order to rope people into buying a subscription.

Yes, that's called "cloaking" and can get you delisted. BMW Germany's website got removed from Google a while back for doing it, and presumably less prominent ones regularly are as well. Google's official position is that you should write a decent web page and they'll be able to figure out how it should rank:

• Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."
• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
• Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
• Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.