Defusing The Google-Bomb - And Maybe Reigniting It
SearchEngineLand reports Google defusing Google-Bombs, with a case study of "miserable failure". Google has made an algorithm change "that minimizes the impact of many Googlebombs."
Let the reverse-engineering begin!
Just as a speculation, and not tested much, here's my guess at the algorithm, *something like*:
IF the links to the page contain [BOMB] and
0) There are lot of links with anchortext [BOMB]
1) [BOMB] does not appear on the page or metadata
2) [BOMB] is the most common anchortext in links to the page
3) There are "very few" links of the form [BOMB otherwords]
THEN ignore all links with [BOMB]
This would preserve the ranking of pages talking about it, since they'll have the words on the page, even in the title.
We can test this by adding lots of links with both the expected text and [BOMB]:
George Bush: "Miserable Failure"
Hi Seth,
Very similar to what Anna Patterson wrote a section titled "Document Annotation for Improved Ranking" in the following document:
Phrase-based indexing in an information retrieval system.
I wrote a little more about that in the comments over at Search Engine Land.
There is also a possibility that Google decreasing count of links by counting them distinct by FULL HTML text of the link (how it was copied by blogger from initiating post).
In this way links
George Bush: "Miserable Failure"
George Bush: "Miserable Failure"
George Bush: "Miserable Failure"
will be different links which will improve count.