OPEN

Googlebombing is something that communicators should understand – because if it ever happens to your boss, you need to be able to explain it rather than making a fool of yourself by getting on the phone to Google and demanding a retraction in a self-righteous fit of fury.

What is Googlebombing?

Well you’ve probably seen those hee-hee-larious email jokes that come round saying type in "failure" into Google and see what comes up – a-ha, a link to George Bush’s biog on the White house official site.

This doesn’t happen because George W is a failure. That would be a value judgement and Google’s algorithims don’t do that just yet. Same goes for "liar", which brings up Tony’ Blair’s official biography.

It doesn’t come up because the Google management are anti-Bush or Blair, or even that pranksters in the Google back office want to brighten up their day by subverting the results of the world’s most used and influential website.

Here’s the explanation from Google’s official blog:

Google’s search results are generated by computer programs that rank
web pages in large part by examining the number and relative popularity
of the sites that link to them. By using a practice called googlebombing,
however, determined pranksters can occasionally produce odd results. In
this case, 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.

So what do you do when you are Googlebombed? Google don’t want to muck around with their search technology’s results – and if world leaders’ perusasive powers can’t get embarrassing results shifted, it’s unlikely that you will.

Looks like you might need to call some very clever search engine optimisation people to find a way to knock it off the top spot. I’d recommend Spannerworks in the UK, though I’ve never briefed them on a job like this.

Thanks for the original link to Steve Rubel…