14 DAY TRIAL // Have you ever searched for a specific word, but Google returned you unexpected results? Well, that's Googlebombing. If I tried to define the term, I would say that Googlebombing represents a practice that influences search engines to return a desired link when a user types a specific phrase. For example, try searching Google for "miserable failure". The first link will redirect you to the official page of White House and George W. Bush. Unexpected, isn't it?
"A Google bomb or Googlewash is Internet slang for a certain kind of attempt to influence the ranking (called PageRank) of a given page in results returned by the Google search engine, often with humorous or political intentions. Because of the way that Google's algorithm works, a page will be ranked higher if the sites that link to that page use consistent anchor text. A Google bomb is created if a large number of sites link to the page in this manner. The phrase "Google bombing" was introduced to the New Oxford American Dictionary in May 2005," Wikipedia tries to explain the term.
How exactly can you do this? It is enough to create a number of websites that will contain links to a webpage displayed for specific keywords.
Marissa Mayer, Director of Consumer Web Products at Google, said on the blog that "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. We don't condone the practice of googlebombing, or any other action that seeks to affect the integrity of our search results, but we're also reluctant to alter our results by hand in order to prevent such items from showing up. Pranks like this may be distracting to some, but they don't affect the overall quality of our search service, whose objectivity, as always, remains the core of our mission."