Google Bombing

In attempting to come up with new blog topic I dug up this email response to my CEO on Google Bombing & how Page Rank works.

The question was "Why is our registered and trademarked domain mentioned on a spam blog http://verbalizethelove.blogsp0t.com?"

My response.. This is called Google Bombing and it is a dark hat technique designed to inflating a sites pagerank and therefore search ranking. And this site is a great example of how it works.


PageRank or PR, named after Google founder Larry Page (really), is calculated by how many backlinks a site contains. The higher the PR value.. the higher ranking. And even though Google says it's not the most important value, experience says it is.

PageRank is calculated by how many relevant, quality backlinks a site contains.

1. How many is defined by how many websites, blogs, bookmarks, article hyperlink your site.

2. Relevance is defined by whether the site linking to you has a similar topic. Like a weight loss site linking to a weight loss site.

3. And quality is defined by by PageRank value. A high PR value site holds more credibility than a site which has no PR value at all. For example WeightWise.org has a PR value of 4 and can pass this ranking along to another site by linking to it. At one time the linked to site got a PR value of 3. However, Google got wise to this scheme and now uses a complicated algorithm to calculate the value. This whole process of passing along PR values through links is called "Link Juice" or "Link Love". Techniques for getting people to link to your site is called "Link Baiting"


Back to the black hat scheme.. Here's how it worked. (BTW, these links are broken. Perhaps Google shut them down?)

http://verbalizethelove.blogspot.com - is linked to http://dagnors.blogspot.com/ which is linked to http://dayz-dreamer.blogspot.com/ - which is linked to http://a-girl-in-me.blogspot.com/ which is linked to http://blazing-death.blogspot.com/ I bet there are hundreds of them. Giving the impression that there are hundreds of backlinks. (How many) All of these sites contain gibberish and contain no real value to the visitor.

However a search engine is not a human and reads these pages thinking that these sites are relevant to the topics mentioned on the page. Within the gibberish you will see reference to WeightWise, weightwatcher, hoodia. Terms that are hot.. and I agree that it is a compliment that we are mentioned and does not harm us in any way because there are no true links, just mentions. (Relevance)

Through out these pages you will see one or more referred real sites. Perhaps these sites either employed a SEO or bought into an actual backlinks scheme? Who knows..

Whatever the case, this method is doing them more harm because the PR value of these above backlinks are zero. And zero can only pass along zero link love. When Google eventually find out about these sites.. watch out.
It's bad mojo all the way around.