Obama is a miserable failure, or at least that’s what Google says.
I kid you not, this one came across my RSS feed from two places. First Obama Is “Failure” At Google & “Miserable Failure” At Yahoo then again from Googlebomb Explodes for President Obama – Failure. It appears that even years after Google’s work to repair Google Bombs, it still managed to explode egg on the face of the new president.
What is a Google Bomb?
For this of you who don’t know what I’m talking about … this is a Google Bomb:
thisismyurl.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/obama-miserable-failure.jpg" rel="lightbox[roadtrip]">
As of eight o’clock tonight, if you search for miserable failure at Yahoo, that’s the result. The above screen capture was taken a couple minutes ago and while I will admit it’s at Yahoo the same appears to have been working at Google for most of the day.
There’s a lot of great coverage on this if your on the right RSS feeds, so I’m not going to blabber on about it for hours but there’s a (now) funny article by Matt Cutts on the subject Algorithm to reduce Googlebomb impact as well as a piece here on website called Why your search engine rank depends on your competitors. that explains what a Google Bomb is and how (*cough*) Google’s done a great job protecting us from them.
Wow. I’d seen the attack done on George Bush but it’s interesting to see it done on Obama now too. I guess no one is safe from the attack :).
This could be devastating to a company if people organized a google bomb using very negative terms targeted at your site. The concept is really crazy and I wish I had more understanding of it.
I’ll check out the articles, thanks!
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What’s interesting to me is that this appears to be more of an ‘echo’ from the Bush Google Bomb than a direct attack on Obama’s page. When the team of web developers responsible for the new team edited the pages they redirected the old website (/president/) using 301 codes. I suspect that this triggered something in Google’s database which resurfaced the dormant SEO values of Miserable Failure.
That is interesting, the later speculation of waking dormant seo values I mean.
If they were to move it back to George Bush (the initial ‘discounted’ url) would it still rank as highly?
If so would it therefore be possible to use discounted/penalised urls and 301 them to a different page and make that page rank for the keyword the initial url was discounted for?
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Interesting…I thought they had fixed that little loophole after the miserable failure and scientology googlebombs.
Matt Cutts covered what happened with this here:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/defuse-googlebomb/
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@malcolm, thanks for pointing that out.
I told so. I even tried to reach the Obama administration in four or five different ways. Do a search on Yahoo right now for miserable failure, and you’ll find President Barack Obama’s page ranking either in the top spot or the second spot. Given a redirect that Obama’s web team has put into place, he should solidify into that number one spot over time. Eventually, Microsoft’s Live Search should reflect that, as well. And over at Google,Obama will likely gain a top page listing for a search on failure.
Yeah, funny that they did that for Obama too. I’m going to head over and read Matt Cutt’s blog on google bombs. Thanks for sharing this because I didn’t really know anything about it.
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The University of Notre Dame in the US state of Indiana has invited President Barack Obama to deliver the school’s commencement address next month, causing consternation among anti-abortion activists.
Google bombs, in my opinion, are hilarious. I just think it’s great that every once in a while, people can make a mockery of the system.
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