Forum Moderators: open
Google "Failure" and you get George W. Bush's biography on the White House web site. It appears to be the official site.
I know that whitehouse.gov has a PR of 9, but the bio page is 7. The word "failure" does not appear on the site. I know that the word "the" gets the whitehouse.gov, but it has PR9 and "the" appears many times on it. "failure" does not appear at all on the bio page.
There are also many sites legitimately found by "failure" -- about heart failure in particular -- with reasonable PRs and "failure" in the title, keywords, and headings.
The no. 2 listing is the biography of Jimmy Carter, also on the whitehouse.gov site. Michael Moore is #3.
Is the number of inbound links so important that some jokesters can put a site at the top of the listings even for a word that doesn't appear in the site?
I'm thinking about having some friends try to get my personal bio page at the top for "handsome rich stud".
On second thought, maybe that's pushing things too far. ;-}
supprised that inbound links with "failure" in the anchor could put a page at the top of the results
Yep, anchor text is very strong. It is usually the answer to the question "How can this lousy page be ranked so high for this term when it doesn't appear anywhere or hardly at all on the page?"
If you look at Google's cached version of the page you see the disclaimer "These terms only appear in links pointing to this page..."
By the way, the complete phrase used for this specific Google bomb is "miserable failure" and was returned in kind, sort of: The White House bio page for Jimmy Carter pops up as an indented number 2.