George W. Bush. Love him. Hate him. Few people are indifferent.

Regardless of your feelings about the GOPs grandmaster of the most unpopular war since Vietnam, he’s no longer a miserable failure - at least, not according to Google. But I hear that MSN still has the president ranked highly according to that Google Bomb.

Uhhh - What’s A Google Bomb?

Good question. A Google Bomb is when multiple websites use the same anchor text to point to a single website. In 2005, thousands of websites made popular a Google Bomb that used the words “miserable failure” to point to George W. Bush’s bio on the White House website. If you typed the words “miserable failure” in to the Google search box then you would have seen that Bush’s bio was in the No. 1 spot. It wasn’t Google’s fault though many people got irate about it and blamed the search giant.

At the heart of Google Bombing, however, is Google’s algorithms. Some SEOs have suggested calling them link bombs because it is a phenomenon that works at all of the search engines. Nevertheless, in January Google changed its algorithms and George W. Bush is no longer a miserable failure. Amazing how that works!

Well, one SEO has an interesting theory. He believes that Google fixed its algorithms so that negative Google Bombs would disappear but those without negative connotations would not. His evidence for this is the strange “great president” phenomenon, among others. If you go right now and type “great president” in to Google’s search box then guess who rises to the top rank position? That’s right, our favorite miserable failure.

So You Mean I Can Spam Google With Positive Google Bombs?

Well, maybe. It’s just a theory. But theories are meant to be tested. So how do you test this theory?

If it were me, I’d say get all your friends together and point to a website you like with a positive key phrase, then wait and see what happens. But there is a flaw in that thinking. You have two challenges:

1. Competition and 2. Keyword Choice

Think about. The more popular the key phrase, the more websites will be competing for it. That means you’ll have to recruit a lot of websites to participate. Otherwise, you may not succeed.

On the other hand, if you choose a keyword phrase that is so obscure that few people will search for that phrase then why bother? It will be a moot point because no one will ever see your Google Bomb. It’s a little bit of a Catch-22.

Maybe that’s why Google didn’t see fit to fix the Google Bomb situation entirely. Or maybe Google’s top execs are Republican and really think George W. Bush is a great president. I don’t know. You decide. One thing’s for sure. In the court of public opinion Bush has not done so well, but when you have the court of public search on your side it doesn’t really matter. You can bomb whomever you want and who’s going to care?

About the Author

Allen Taylor writes the News and Media Blog, a daily commentary on the news, the media and the people talking about them.