google bomb the arabian gulf
google bomb
The most successful Google
bomb on the internet to date would certainly have to be the
now famous
Arabian
Gulf bomb. This was the combined efforts of hundreds
of bloggers, webmasters and Persian forums who pointed links
with the word Arabian Gulf to a spoof error page found at
www.arabian-gulf.info.
It
all started with a single blogger, the
Lego Fish,
who, after the outrage of the global Iranian community and
indeed even the Iranian government over the National
Geographic's disgraceful act of printing "Arabian
Gulf" in brackets underneath the one true name for this
important waterway, suggested that the online community of
Iranians retaliate by "Google Bombing" the words
Arabian
Gulf.
The first spoof page was set
up at
http://www.legofish.com/arabian_gulf.htm. Within
hours, dozens of bloggers had taken up the campaign and linked
to this page. Within days, hundreds of Iranian websites,
weblogs and Forums had linked to it.
So what exactly is the Google
Bomb?
Wikipedia defines it as an attempt to influence the
ranking of a given site in results returned by the Google
search engine. Due to the way that Google's PageRank algorithm
works, a website will be ranked higher if the sites that link
to that page all use consistent anchor text.
Basically, Google has a
ranking system which assigns importance to the number of links
to a website and the words used to link to websites which it
lists. So if there are lets say one hundred links to a
site about bananas, with each link having the word banana in
it, then that site will most probably come up as the first
page in the Google search for bananas.
Thus, the more links which
pointed to the Arabian Gulf
page and with the words
Arabian Gulf
in the links (Just as every mention is linked on this
page), the higher that page went in the Google search.
Within days of the initial
suggestion for the Google Bomb, if a person was to type
Arabian Gulf in a Google Search, the first result had
become
www.arabian-gulf.info.
In addition to the Error 404
bomb, there are now many other clever and humorous
Arabian
Gulf Bombs. The Google search for
Arabian Gulf will reveal more bombs than it will
information, not that any article containing the words Arabian
and Gulf are actually credible or worthwhile pieces of
information.
I have linked to many of
these other google bombs in this page, so if you would like
some entertainment, please click on each
Arabian Gulf link
(including this one). We encourage more pages devoted to
ridiculing the concept of the
Arabian Gulf,
so if you have created a humorous page, please contact us, and
let us know about it.
This is my personal
Favourite: Google Search-
arabian gulf
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