Google Bombing is one of the traditional SEO techniques in which spammers used to build back links in bulk with a common anchor text which is not related with the subject matter of the concerned website in order to get top positions on the search engine result pages (SERP).
It is related to Spamdexing, which is one of the SEO techniques to change on page factors like repeating unrelated keywords in Meta Tags or in the content section to get higher ranking in search engines.
A Google bomb or Google wash is an attempt to influence the ranking of a given site in results returned by the Google search engine. Due to the way that Google's PageRank algorithm works, a website will be ranked higher if the sites that link to that page all use consistent anchor text. Googlebomb is used both as a verb and a noun.
A Google bomb is an attempt to bias a search result on Google by increasing a Web page's PageRank algorithm not only considers keywords when determining PageRank, it also considers the number of other sites that link to a page and the words used in the link description. A successful Google bomb requires that a high number of Web sites (often blogs working together) link to a specific Web page using specific words in the hyperlink. Enlisting high-traffic sites is especially important when creating a Google bomb, as their outgoing hyperlinks weigh more in Google's search algorithm.
The first Google bomb occurred in 1999. While the creators remain anonymous, the existence of the bomb was revealed when pjammer, a user on memepool.com, posted a question that asked what Google found to be "more evil than satan himself." Users searching Google for the term found Microsoft's home page as the first link in the search results. The term itself was coined by Adam Mathes in 2001, when he wrote an article about how he bombed the term "talentless hack" to play a joke on a friend, graphic designer Andy Pressman.
One of the most famous Google bombs occured in 2004, when U.S. President George W. Bush was up for re-election. To experience this particular Google bomb, try searching for "miserable failure" on Google. The first return will be a link to the biography of George W. Bush on the official White House Web site. In order for the bomb to work, a large number of Web pages had to link to the White House biography page with the authors using the exact words "miserable failure" in their hyperlink descriptions.
For example, if a user registers many domains and all of them link to a main site with the text "... is a living legend" then searching for "living legend" on Google will return the main site higher in the ranking, even if the phrase "living legend" doesn't appear on the main site. A common means of exploiting this is through weblogs, where although the entry may disappear from the main page quickly, the short-term effects of a link can dramatically affect the ranking of a given site. Empirical results indicate that it does not take a large number of websites to achieve a Googlebomb. The effect has been achieved with only a handful of dedicated weblogs.
