Googlebombing 'Failure' and 'Read This'

Google’s official blog explained last month the reason a search for “failure” leads first to the White House biography page for President G. W. Bush. They say it’s called “googlebombing,” the popular use of select key words when linking to a site.

“In this case,” Google reports, “a number of webmasters use the phrases [failure] and [miserable failure] to describe and link to President Bush’s website, thus pushing it to the top of searches for those phrases.”

As an apparent retaliation, webmasters have made the second link listed for this search Michael Moore’s site.

But this is key word method Google uses to be the best search engine on the Net. Googlebombing is natural. Searching for “fabulous” takes you to fabulous.com. “Brilliant” takes you to brilliant-tutorials.com. “Read this” takes you to the Wikipedia entry on Podcasting, unless you put the words in quotes, then you reach help page on suicide.

And if you search for “Litblog co-op,” you reach that topic on Mark Sarvas’s blog. In fact, you won’t find The Litblog Co-op site in the top 40 links of that search, which was as many as I cared to scan just now.

May I suggest a googlebomb to the litblog community? Let’s mark Read This as a common term for linking to The Litblog Co-op. The bloggers involved are encouraging us to broaden our reading. Let’s help by encouraging our readers to Read This.

For whatever reason, The Litblog Co-op uses a meta tag to tell some search engines to ignore it. Google and Ask Jeeves appear to ignore the site. I see that Yahoo and Altavista pull up the right site under a “Litblog co-op” search. Dogpile’s combined search lists the Co-op as #6-7. Still, I suggest we link to the co-op using Read This, thereby increasing exposure to those who don’t read litblogs.

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