President Barack Obama has been the victim of a Google bomb for the keyword phrase “Cheerful Achievement”. If you were to go to Google and type in this unusual phrase, the Whitehouse Homepage came up as the top search result.
This Google bomb was the work of Eric Baillargeon who claimed mission accomplished at 10:45 a.m. PST. Google places a strong emphasis on backlinks. If a site were to get backlinks in large numbers, Google deems the site to be a authority on the subject and site receives a higher ranking in their search engine listings.
A Google bomb is an artificial manipulation of search engine rankings. It’s where large numbers of sites will deliberately link back to one site using a specific keyboard phrase to try and artificially boost that sites rankings. In this case, it was the whitehouse.gov site and the phrase was cheerful achievement.
Google staff were quiet on this subject, reiterating a two year old blog post:
“By improving our analysis of the link structure of the web, Google has begun minimizing the impact of many Googlebombs. Now we will typically return commentary, discussions, and articles about the Googlebombs instead,” Ryan Moulton and Kendra Carattini said in the pos
Google bombs don’t last all that long. However, for now, this isn’t a bad phrase for Obama. It’s certainly much better then the Google Bomb that was sent George Bush’s way a few years ago, where he ranked for the phrase “miserable failure”.
[Via]
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