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Googlebombing still working

Article at the register describes changing the meaning of a word

         

eaden

12:42 am on Apr 4, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



"
On February 17 a front page news analysis in the New York Times bylined by Patrick Tyler described the global anti-war protests as the emergence of "the second superpower".
...."

but a simple googlebomb changes the meaning of "second superpower" in 42 days.

[theregister.co.uk...]

jeremy goodrich

12:51 am on Apr 4, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Great writing, as always - though the only time I read there is when somebody drops a link here. :)

Amazing how small the number of people it took to do that...wow. Snip the phrase, redefine it - in just about the same time as it takes for Google to do one index cycle.

Fascinating way to look at the web.

Chris_R

12:52 am on Apr 4, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



It didn't have much meaning to begin with.

These news stories are cute and all, but they don't mean much.

People don't search for "rat f*****" and "Second Superpower"

There is a whopping 112,000 results for that term - only 5 FIVE - F I V E use the anchor text. That is Five Page out of 3 Billion

By comparison Third Superpower gives 9 whole pages out 3 Billion with anchor text.

If I linked to this page using the words

"Silly Googlebombing Stories" - Next month - this page will be number one for that term.

Always good to see news stories though

GrinninGordon

1:16 am on Apr 4, 2003 (gmt 0)



Maybe Google should Googlebomb themselves (for the search term "Google sucks")!

No offence GoogleGuy, Google do not suck. I just read this article and Chris_R's reply, and wondered if you would have this one covered. Obviously not yet!

:-)

rfgdxm1

1:48 am on Apr 4, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



"There's a sign on the wall but she wants to be sure
And you know sometimes words have two meanings"

-Led Zeppelin, from "Stairway To Heaven"

Ironic that in this Led Zeppelin song about a fictional drug abusing woman they have her realizing this truth, yet this writer in the Register doesn't get it. Perhaps he needs nootropics? ;) Check this out:

[google.ca...]

Put that in quotation marks, and it gets a whopping 1080 instances on the web. Give me a two word phrase that is this non-competitive, and using SEO tactics I could probably grab #1 for it. What is going on here is that 2 different groups are using this phrase on the Internet with a different meaning. And, that second meaning just happens to have a definition which is about Internet user specifically. No wonder that on Google this second meaning dominates; on the Internet that is how it is used the most.

quotations

2:05 am on Apr 4, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Ought to be able to take over "Silly Googlebombing Stories" with freshbot. Let's check it again on Saturday.

quotations

9:24 pm on Apr 4, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



It is a day earlier than I thought it would be.

"Silly Googlebombing Stories" is now in the results on www3. and www2.

(this thread is one of the pages listed.)

steve128

9:36 pm on Apr 4, 2003 (gmt 0)



Anyone took a look at the pr10.com website, good name, but do the tactics work -;

Receptional Andy

10:03 pm on Apr 4, 2003 (gmt 0)



Following webmasterworld's example, I think we can prove googlebombing is easy [andylangton.co.uk]

mods - please delete the link if you feel it is inappropriate, I just like the experiment and am encouraged by alcohol ;)

Receptional Andy

10:20 pm on Apr 4, 2003 (gmt 0)



hehe, just searched for 'silly googlebombing stories' on Google and it looks like the experimnt has already worked ;)

just noticed a few links with that text ;)

quotations

10:33 pm on Apr 4, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Yes,

Yesterday there were no links anywhere with

"silly googlebombing stories"

Today there are 7 links.

GoogleGuy

11:02 pm on Apr 4, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



It's not to hard to show up for a search if no one else on the web uses those words. :) I think there were only ~300 pages on the web with "second superpower" on them a month ago, and they were all about random things..

There aren't any crawl-accessible pages on the NY Times site that mention "second superpower," for example. We can't return pages that don't exist on the web. :)

quotations

11:44 pm on Apr 4, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



But look how quick freshbot is.

Eight hours from making a comment here to being able to find it on www.google.com.

Long live freshbot! Long live GoogleGuy!