Blog Traffic Tactics: Learn From Google Bombs
OK, OK, we’d better define our terms before we get into this one.
Most people have never heard of a “google bomb”, much less learned how to put it to practical use.
“Google Bombs” started in 2002, when a rather creative fellow stumbled onto the fact that the indexing of sites was heavily influenced by the text of the incoming links to those sites, and whether those links were relatively new.
As a joke, this guy started linking all of his blog pages to a friend’s website, using “talentless hack” as part of the link text. He also encouraged other bloggers and webmasters to do the same.
In short order, when you searched for “talentless hack” in Google, the first listing on the results page was the website of the guy who was the target of this creative practical joke.
As far as I know, that was the first “google bomb”. All those sites linking to one using the same link text led to miscategorization of the target site, or at least led to it showing up in a strange place in the search engine results.
Several years later there continued to be a small but avid community of “google bombers” out there. Some probably continued to use this to play jokes on friends and even public figures. I’ve read about one particular campaign that was aimed at a public company that the culprit had a grievance with, and there have certainly been more than a few such campaigns aimed at political figures.
By now, the search engines have adapted their algorithms to put a stop to this, since it quickly became obvious that competitors could use it to get someones site misplaced in the search engines.
But there’s also a practical application of this, since search engines now evaluate site pages based upon the outgoing link text.
Many people think that is now a more important factor than the incoming link text, although the subject is still debated.
In any case, several applications have cropped up to take advantage of this. They’re called RSS parsers. These applications will query one or more RSS feeds, convert what they find to HTML, and seemlessly insert the content into your web pages.
The result is constantly changing content, with the page “themed” to a particular key phrase. In other words, ideal “spider food”. The search engine spiders visit your site more often, and the more of these pages they find, the more they consider your site an “authority”.
If you do this right, the spiders find outgoing links “themed” to match the overall theme of your site. Not only do you get the advantage of constantly updated content, which the search engines love, you also get the advantage of all of those themed outgoing links.
Why is that important? Because “authority sites” (those with lots of incoming and outgoing links) get heavier weight in the ranking algorithm than do regular sites. Those ranking algorithms look for sites with lots of relevant incoming links, and they look for sites with lots of relevant outgoing links.
Although the original way to “bomb” the search engines was to post those highly targeted links all over the place, you can also “bomb” the other way around, and get your pages spidered and indexed because of the fact they contain fresh content and lots of relevant outgoing links.
The main reason that search engines love blogs is that they contain constantly updated content, and lots of outgoing links. The same principle applies to a dynamic page on your web site. It’s called a “dynamic” page, because the RSS parser is automatically re-creating it at regular intervals, so that site visitors and spiders always seem to find something new on that page.
If you aren’t using this technique, you really ought to think about it. Even if you don’t want to go to the trouble of an RSS parser and automated content, at least be sure to post some quality outgoing links on your site, pointing to other “authority sites” in your niche. That alone will help get you a few extra points when the search engines categorize your site.
Happy Blogging!
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Filed under: Blog Traffic Generation
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