Simple Techniques Still Work - The Case of a Google Bomb

The recent Google bomb by the ‘Anonymous’ group grains the Scientologists has revealed much about how SEO works today. Analysis of this attack reveals what does and doesn’t work in today’s internet marketing world. Many of these techniques are already covered in the How to Maximize your Web Traffic eBook. But this article covers the attack in detail and reveals the tips and tricks you can learn from it.

I don’t know if you’ve been following the web news lately, but the buzz in both the infosphere and the blogsphere is about the Google bomb perpetrated by a group known simply as ‘Anonymous’ against during the final week of January 2008.

This is interesting as Google claimed, during 2007 that they had put in place measures that would prevent this kind of attack. This still didn’t prevent the Anonymous group from getting the Church of Scientology ranked third in Google for the term ‘dangerous cult’. Now, I certainly don’t condone this kind of attack. However, the strategies employed (some of them at least) point towards very good learning lessons for internet marketers.

Now, according to Google sites shouldn’t be ranked for a search term if those terms are not actually on the website being pointed at. The interesting thing here is that the term ‘dangerous’ was on the Scientology website, but the term ‘cult’ was not. Thus Scientology should not be ranked for the search term ‘dangerous cult’ — but it was!

The term ‘cult’ was only found in the links pointing towards the website which means that anchor text is still very important in getting a web page ranked for a certain term. The more in-bound links you have with that term in it pointing to your website or web page the more likely you are of being ranked for that search term!

The attack itself was conducted from a single wiki page: http://www.partyvan.info/index.php/Project_Chanology/Operations#Google_Bomb which gives information about how to conduct a Google bomb and introduces a plan to create a Google bomb not only targeting “dangerous cult,” but also “ brainwashing cult” and whatever keyword supporters wanted to match with “cult.” They also wished to replace Scientology.org with Xenu.net, a site aimed at debunking the religion, as the number one result for the keyword “scientology.”

Members are instructed to set up blogs, to utilize email, press releases and press release sites, Digg.com, YouTube, and other social networking sites, as well as comments in comment sections and they are actively discouraged from employing spam.

This fits-in with how Google has skewed its search rankings of late to make buzzy, timely, resources such as social networks and blogs far more important in terms of rankings. It’s certainly true (and I can confirm this) that Google weights Wikipedia, Digg and YouTube very heavily in their ranking calculations. Though Wikipedia and Digg have rel=nofollow because the sites rank highly any links in them to your site will be followed and you will get passive traffic this way.

What the strategies employed by the ‘Anonymous’ group shows us is that:

If you are starting a campaign today, then the more integrated an approach you can employ, the better it is for your campaign.

If you would like to know more about these techniques and how to employ them then have a look at my How to Maximize your Web Traffic eBook.

Of course, one of the really easy ways to ged good quality in-bound links to your site is to write articles and include links in the resource box. If you’re going down this route (and it’s well worth it, believe me) then the utilities below will help you with your submissions and your overall marketing strategy:

— Dyfed Lloyd Evans

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