PDX Happenings

Apparently a Polish guy was testing out a software program that he created where he could get a first place ranking in the Google’s SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) for any keyword of his choosing (which by the way, would have been outed by Google’s algorithm at some point). The word he chose was “kutas”, which when translated to English means “penis”. He was arrested because the site that showed up in the rankings was for the Polish president. Any time a user searched the word “kutas”, the president’s site would show up #1. Here’s the article.

This article is calling it Google Bombing, which isn’t the correct term. Here is the Wikipedia definition of Google Bombing. In essence, Google Bombing is a practice where a site would link to another site using, in most cases, a malicious keyword. Google’s ranking algorithm takes the number of sites linking to your own (called inbound links) into account when ranking sites. The more sites that link to you, the better your site ranks, as long as the sites linking to you are credible (porn and gambling sites certainly wouldn’t help your ranking if they were linking to your site). Here’s an example of what Google Bombing would look like:

This guy is a real dupek.

So I’ve used Jay’s blog as an example. If I owned numerous sites, or got a group of bloggers or discussion forum users to gang up on Jay and everyone linked to his site with the word “dupek”, there is a good chance that Jay’s site could rank for this keyword (considering a number of other factors, but I’m just providing an easy example). No offense Jay, I needed to use somebody as an example.

I hope you all enjoyed your SEO lesson for today. Now repeat after me…Goo-Gul Bom-Ing. Well done class, well done.