Probably one of the most infamous (or famous, depends on your perspective) uses of the Googlebomb was linking “miserable failure” to the Whitehouse.gov page about George Bush. Guess what? Google has removed the ability to Googlebomb.

I’ve had a lot of fun reading up on what people think of this one. Lots of people loved Googlebombs, others loathed them.

The think to remember is that this is not intended to damage appropriate link building efforts. This is to impact linking campaigns that are designed to make a site come up for unwelcome results. Theoretically, this should not harm your regular SEO efforts.

If you want to read some good analyses of this, I would suggest taking a look at The Googlebomb Conspiracy: The Truth is Out There and Google Kills Bush’s Miserable Failure Search & Other Google Bombs.

To make a long story short, Google isn’t trying to do anything harmful. They’re trying to protect their results from the sometimes malicious practice of Googlebombing. Sure they were sometimes just in fun, but sometimes the results were highly inappropriate. That might not be such a problem if only people didn’t sometimes assume that these things reflected the views of Google as a company, rather than the opinions of others.

If you like, you can read Google’s statement about this on their blog. Always to get it straight from the horse’s mouth, as it were, and not just read the analyses, which might miss something.

Many people are worried that Google is going to start ignoring link text, and that that is how they’ve removed Googlebombing as a possibility. If you read up on everything, you’ll see that such is not the case. Their solution is clearly more subtle than that, as it would have to be in order for Google to continue functioning well as a search engine.

It’s hard to say exactly how Google is doing it. Certainly there are symptoms, such as a sudden spike of links using all the same link text that is not relevant to the content on the page. This is tricky, since sometimes links can be built using words not on the page yet still be relevant.

In other words, I don’t know how they’re doing it. But it sounds like a really great idea.

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