Israeli Prime Minister Gets Google Bombed - And That’s Good For Everyone
There aren’t so many search stories to come out of Israel, where RankAbove headquarters are located, so we got excited about this one.
Our PM, Ehud Olmert, whose approval ratings here mirror Bush’s in the U.S., has gotten a similar Google Bomb to the American President. A search in Google Israel for “כישלון חרוץ“, which basically means “miserable failure”, brings up the Gov.il home page of Ehud Olmert. In case you’ve forgotten, a search in Google for “miserable failure” brings up the WhiteHouse.gov (not .com) bio for George W. Bush.
Google Bombs work because of the power Google places on inbound links and the anchor text, or linking text, those sites use. So if a thousand people link to John Kerry’s home page with the term waffles, then John Kerry’s pages comes up number one for waffles. After all, a thousand people “thought” his page was about waffles, so Google thought so too.
So, is Google Bombing a bad thing? Is Kerry really a waffle? Are Olmert and Bush miserable failures?
Many people point to Google Bombing as a loophole in the Google Algorithm, as a sign that Google should stop relying on anchor text for ranking as it opens itself up to abuse. I see just the opposite. If so many people believe that Olmert is a miserable failure–he is! Google was web 2.0 before web 1.0 had even been defined - by using an algorithm that judges relevancy based on popularity (and thus on perception), Google has–rightly so–put the power of SEO in the hands of the people. If 86% of Israelis believe that Olmert is a כישלון חרוץ, then he is one. And so if you search for a miserable failure in Israel–as the saying goes–his face should be in the dictionary, or in the search engine.
As a side note: the phrase כישלון חרוץ was previously applied, with a Hebrew pun, to IDF head Dan Halutz, who just resigned as a result of the Lebanon war and his subsequent unpopularity. Who knows what this bomb will bring? The papers here are having a field day with it.
