Googlebombs

[mtnman]

Detecting Googlebombs




Detecting Googlebombs


I recently did a Googlebomb post over on the Google Public Policy Blog. I’ve talked about Googlebomb phenomenon before (also see more Googlebomb background here). Just as a reminder, a Googlebomb is a prank where a group of people on the web try to push someone else’s site to rank for a query that it didn’t intend to (and normally wouldn’t want to) rank for. Typically these queries tend to be unusual phrases such as “talentless hack†that don’t really have any existing strong results.
Danny Sullivan asked a good question in this most recent round of coverage about Googlebombs:

Obama no longer ranks for “failure†on Google. The White House hasn’t changed anything. The link data that Google has been using to rank the Bush page — data inherited by Obama’s page — hasn’t changed. So the Googlebomb fix for this that hasn’t worked since earlier this month just happens to kick in a few hours after I post this article? That’s going to kick off another round of questioning over how “automated†that fix really is…
​

I wanted to address that question. The short answer is that we do two different things — both of them algorithmic — to handle Googlebombs: detect Googlebombs and then mitigate their impact. The second algorithm (mitigating the impact of Googlebombs) is always running in our productionized systems. The first algorithm (detecting Googlebombs) has to process our entire web index, so in most typical cases we tend not to run that algorithm every single time we crawl new web data. I think that during 2008 we re-ran the Googlebomb detection algorithm 5-6 times, for example. You can think of it like this:

The defusing algorithm is running all the time, but the algorithm to detect Googlebombs is only run occasionally. We re-ran our algorithm last week and it detected both the [failure] and the [cheerful achievement] Googlebombs, so our system now minimizes the impact of those Googlebombs. Instead of a whitehouse.gov url, you now see discussion and commentary about those queries.
Related Posts:

• Site feedback for 4-5 sites
  Completely independent of the recent algorithm to minimize the impact of Googlebombs, we continue to do data pushes on a near-daily basis where some people...
• Algorithm to reduce Googlebomb impact
  There's a post up on the Google webmaster blog that discusses a change to reduce the impact of Googlebombs. If you've never heard of a...

Permalink

36 Comments »

1. Harith Said,
   
   January 25, 2009 @ 2:50 pm
   Matt,
   You wrote:
   “We re-ran our algorithm last week and it detected both the [failure] and the [cheerful achievement] Googlebombs, so our system now minimizes the impact of those Googlebombs.â€
   And Danny wrote:
   “So the Googlebomb fix for this that hasn’t worked since earlier this month just happens to kick in a few hours after I post this article?â€
   The question is: has Danny’s article any impact on Google to re-run its algorithm (detecting Googlebombs) last week
   
2. Matt Cutts Said,
   
   January 25, 2009 @ 5:10 pm
   Harith, we did re-run our algorithm because of the discussion of Googlebombs last week. But if the detection algorithm hadn’t detected those caught those Googlebombs, we wouldn’t have changed anything manually.
   In fact, that’s what happened with [failure]. Danny noted in this article from January 7th, 2008, that [failure] was returning a whitehouse.gov page:
   I’ve just noticed today that for a search on failure, the US President’s home page currently ranks in the top results…
   ​
   What happened there is we re-ran our algorithm in December 2008, and at that time the detection algorithm didn’t flag [failure] as a Googlebomb. We don’t claim that our detection algorithm is 100% perfect; for example, that can happen because the link structure of the web does change over time, as does how we crawl the web. To me, the December 2007-to-January 2008 behavior for [failure] is pretty good evidence that we run our algorithms and then stick with the output of those algorithms.
3. Dave (originial) Said,
   
   January 25, 2009 @ 6:03 pm
   I see googlebombs as mostly harmless that only gives the perpetrator some self-satisfaction.
   I wish Google would give this much attention to the “SEO professionals†who use dodgy practices, rather than punishing their victims (the Webmaster who has paid).
4. Matt Cutts Said,
   
   January 25, 2009 @ 6:57 pm
   Dave (originial), this seems to be a topic that captures peoples’ imagination — Danny’s post about Googlebombs was one of his most popular in 2007, I think. So in the interest of transparency, openness, and better communication, I wanted to answer the questions from this most recent round of coverage.
5. Eric Baillargeon Said,

 

Dislike ads? Become a Fastlane member: Subscribe today and surround yourself with winners and millionaire mentors, not those broke friends who only want to drink beer and play video games. :-)

[CMCarlin]

Gappz, O katv deahjv e vjsief up vjot up 'epuvjis' neslivoph gusan. Figopovimz tuni opvisitvoph tvagg!