Last week Fox News reported Google Quickly Defuses Obama Google Bomb (see Unlike Bush’s ‘Google Bomb,’ Google Quickly Defuses Obama’s). Here’s an excerpt of the story:

In 2003, President Bush’s detractors successfully gamed the Google search engine by arranging to have countless Web sites link the words “miserable failure” to Bush’s official biography on the White House Web site.

The result was that when someone typed the search term “miserable failure” into the Google search box, Bush’s bio rose to the top of the search results.

And that’s how it stayed until 2007, when Google developed an algorithm to detect what became known as “Google bombs” and re-directed the term “miserable failure” to non-political pages.

Unfortunately for Obama, “miserable failure” reverted back to his bio when he moved into the White House. The new president was also Google-bombed with the phrase “cheerful achievement.”

But this time, Google stepped in quickly, rectifying the situation in a few days, instead of four years.

Below is an example of the results you would have gotten in Google a number of years ago for the query “miserable failure”.

Here is an excerpt of Google’s response to this “Googlebombing ‘failure’”:

Regardless of your political persuasion, Google bombs underscore the power of link juice. Recently, Scott Dimmick blogged Are You Helping the Opposition’s Cause? and pointed out how linking affects a site’s PageRank. I recommend a read through if you are concerned where you send your site’s link juice.

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