Google Bombs and Other PageRank Tricks

I find all of this talk about Google Bombs very interesting, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to look at this bomb phenomenon a little closer and see how it applies to my own site.

According to John Hiler, Adam Mathes discovered these bombs last year. Adam Mathes of Uber:

Google is unique among search engines in that while it almost always shows you pages that have the exact keywords you are looking for, occasionally it will show you pages that don’t have those keywords, but other pages linked to that page with those words.

I first discovered this when searching for internet rockstar, which turned up Ben’s page. [editor: Adam is referring to internet rockstar Ben Brown] At the time though, he did not actually have that phrase on his page however the legions of teeny-bopper blogger morons who linked to him always used that phrase in their links.

As Hiler describes, what this basically means is that linker can impact the Google rank of the linkee. More precisely, when a lot of linkers use the same search term to link to the same site, they can really impact the Google rank of the linkee.

So that made me wonder a why I’m the #11 Joshua at Google right now when I started this weblog only a month a half ago. A Google backlink search finds that Google has only indexed backlinks from a handful of sites. How could only a handful of sites influence Google’s PageRank that much? I went to the source to find the answer:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

In essence, if a site is linked only once from another very popular site, this could affect the site’s Google PageRank just as easily as hundreds of links from very unpopular sites. As far as I know, there’s one popular site that links me from their list of blogs - bradlauster.com. Hiler notes that these lists of blogs are increasing becoming known as the “Blogrolling” section of the blog, which leads into a more important point.

Most importantly, a blogrolling link never scrolls off a weblog’s frontpage. This greatly magnifies the impact of a blogrolling link, making them a much more potent Google Bomb.

That makes sense. But can a blogrolling link on only one site affect Google’s PageRank that much? What about a blogrolling link that appears on on every page of one site, like it does on bradlauster.com? These are two questions that I’m still trying to figure out.

Regardless of how Google indexes these blogrolling links, there’s another way to affect PageRank. I had previously thought that if I visited other sites and commented now and again, making sure to always link my name to my site, it would be a great way to build traffic to my site. However, in light of John Hiler’s article, I’ve realized that those simple comments could help me a little more than I originally thought. Why start a Google bomb squad when you can quietly use your own comments as artillery?

So I’d like to take this opportunity to thank bradlauster.com, Elegant Hack, and blackbeltjones.com, for allowing me to comment on their very popular weblogs. Cheers to Christina, Brad, Matt, and especially Google for allowing me to show you that truly anyone can be a Web superstar.