Well, it was bound to happen. Google has now fixed the Google Bomb 'problem'. If you don't know what I'm talking about here's the phenomena in a nutshell. In the past, it's been possible to manipulate Google's search results by linking to sites in a particular way. The most famous example was "miserable failure". The first result used to be George Bush's biography on whitehouse.gov. This was accomplished by bloggers/webmasters linking to that page with the words "miserable failure" as the anchor (link) text. This worked up to even a week ago. Do the same search now and you get entirely different results.
There's a good writeup here on what Google may be doing differently. From patent filings, it looks like anchor text that is not related to on-page content is ignored. What this means is link text can still help you rank high but only if it's related to your page. A page about "miserable failure" will still benefit from lots of links using "miserable failure" as the anchor text. Even a page with related terms will benefit, like "profound disappointment". But a page with links that don't match the content (like "miserable failure" and GW's bio) won't rank high.
Based on the past 6 years, one could argue that "miserable failure" and GW are related but in a semantic sense they are not. :)
The Google Bomb used to be my favorite illustration of the power of inbound links for search engine rankings. But in the grand scheme, things haven't really changed. Inbound links with the proper text are still crucial for ranking high.
Let's take a look at the first page for the words "teen driving" (it's a project I'm working on right now for a client). Out of the ten top sites, all TEN of them have at least one link with those words as the anchor text (google allinanchor: teen driving). It's pretty clear even after all the changes Google has made to its algorithm, anchor text is still a dominant factor.
Side note: As of 1/26/07, the "miserable failure" Google Bomb still works on Yahoo and MSN, but they can't be far behind in making their adjustments.
Tags: Google, Google Bomb, Miserable Failure, SEO, George Bush
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