Well, at least not according to Google.
For more than two years now, the CV page for George W Bush has been ranking in the top position when somebody searched for the two words [miserable failure]. No more though. The reason why it ranked up there was that a few hundred thousand web pages had a link with the two words linked to the page. That was enough for it to achieve this not too flattering first position in Google’s result pages. The phenonemon even has a name. The Google Bomb.
According to Google the change is not manual, but totally algoritmic, and this really makes it interesting for SEO specialist who advocate an on-site technique for search engine optimization.
I cannot be 100% sure (nobody can but a small team lead by Matt Cutts), but I’m pretty confident that Google has changed their algoritm in a way that makes everyday life much harder for search engine spammers. I think that the change in the algo consists of these two significant changes:
- the searched text must actually be written on the page that is to rank for a key phrase, in order for a page to be allegible for ranking for the phrase (the text string [miserable failure] is nowhere to be found on the whitehouse.gov page in question)
- the site where the page resides should have internal links with the sought text as a linked keyword
If I’m right, then Google has taken a really big step forward in it’s fight with search engine spammers of all kinds. Also, it strengthen the kind of SEO that I, and many white hat SEO’s with me, advocate, i.e. that the most important keywords should be prominant in a page, and that the site should have a good, text based link strukture with the most prominent key phrases as linked text.
Read more about Google’s algo change at Searchengineland.com
See also:
googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/
www.mattcutts.com/blog/algorithm-to-reduce-googlebomb-impact/
