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:

1. 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)
2. 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/

There has been quite a commotion in the SEO world lately. Google’s as much feared as anticipated dance is late, and Google’s test servers aren’t doing what SEO’s have grown used to. There are zillions of discussions going on about this at forums such as SEOchat.com and WebmasterWorld.com.

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Once upon a time there was a monthly event that hypnotized and stole almost all attention from a great number of webmasters. It was called the Google dance. Today it doesn’t exist anymore. Since a couple of months back Google updates it’s index almost every day. Depending on the size and update frequency of your site, it will get spidered by Google daily or at least weekly. Search engin result pages change all the time. At least for the very popular search terms that many sites want to get in top for. The dance is on forever, and thus no longer news. In fact, this might be the only dancing activities Google is involved in right now. Read the rest of this entry »

This site is regularly scanned by Google. In fact, I have a much better rating on Google than I deserve. How is that? It’s no great secret really. Recently it mostly has to do with the fact that I am listed on sites like Daypop, Blogdex and the new Popdex (which, by the way, looks remarkably much like Blogdex).

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