Web Earnings

Google yesterday announced a change in their algorithm that they say will reduce the effect of ‘googlebombing’. Google’s webmaster central describes a Google bomb as “a prank where people attempt to cause someone else’s site to rank for an obscure or meaningless query.” For example, before yesterday, a search for ‘liar’ would bring TonyBlair’s biography in number one position, and Miserbale Failure would bring up George Bush’s government homepage in number one position. Google’s algoroithm has traditionally been weighted towards the inbound links to a page, and one aspect of this is the ‘anchor text’ of the link (the text that you click on to navigate to the page). A googlebomb, is created by creating links to a specific page with the target keyphrase in the anchor text.

Google’s new alogrithm ensures that this can’t happen. It should also have a large affect on sites that use automated tools to generate inbound links. There are some concerns that this may affect innocent websites, something that Google will no doubt have to look at over the next few days and weeks. For more interesting reading try this and this