Backlinking, Googlebombing and Fuckwits…
A colleague came into work this morning with a ‘Google conundrum’ for me – “How come when I search for the keyword fuckwit in Google, it comes back with John Prescotts homepage?”.
My colleague had scanned the entire page and “surprisingly” couldn’t find the keyword anywhere, not in the page title, not in any H tags and not even in any black hat style hidden text that “Jonny two jags” may have slipped into his page to improve his rankings! – so how the hell did he make it to the top of google?
All joking aside about the result being highly relevant and correct, SEO aficionados will probably already recognise this as Google Bombing (or more accurately link bombing). Wikipedia has a great article on Google bombing which is well worth a read, but basically – this page tops the rankings because of a well executed backlinking strategy – albeit one which the page owner was neither aware or (presumably) supportive of.
This particular page got to the top of the SERPS because enough people linked to it with the keyword “fuckwit” somewhere inside the anchor text. The fact that the keyword is not present anywhere on the page is, in this case, irrelevant. Of course it helps that the particular keyword in question does not have much competition (unlike, for example “ipod”) and it helps if you have a few thousand blogger friends to help you achive your goal.
It illustrates very clearly the role that backlinking plays in search optimisation and this is an area that many organisations neglect – its not uncommon to see links in “preferred supplier” lists that are made up of a single image with no alt tag rather than some descriptive, keyword rich text.
Syndication
