In the Is targeting personal names okay? (http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=2042) thread, we've had a discussion of the appropriateness of buying ads that appear in a search for someone's name.

I took a post out of that discussion last week by Everyman (http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/member.php?u=97), because it raised an interesting but tangental issue. When/is it appropriate to use links to influence what shows up for someone's name?

I told Everyman that I'd spin his original post into a new thread, as was appropriate. In his case, it's a page from seobook (http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/member.php?u=97)'s site that comes up first for Everyman's name. An excerpt from his original post:

Mr. Wall's page with my name and his book in the title now come up number one in Google on a search for my name, Daniel Brandt, without any quotation marks. The total hits are 338,000.

I informed Mr. Wall last month that I had a problem with my name and his book in the title of this page, and also with the way he linked to a demo I put up that was intended to be educational (I'm nonprofit and also never run ads on my sites). He had placed my input form for the demo directly on his page, and skipped my educational setup page, and then mentioned that SEOs could use my tool (which uses a proxy) to keep from getting discovered by Google. There's a huge blurb for his book on that same page.

Mr. Wall thought it was very amusing when I objected to his page. Last July he put up the page to sell more copies of his book. After I objected in September, after noticing that a search on my name showed his page at number 3, he went into high gear to teach me a lesson. Instead of fixing the page, he added a number of additional links to strengthen the Google juice behind it, and also linked to a thread with my name in the thread title, where he and his buddies denounced me further.

OK, that's one example of linking to impact someone's name. It's somewhat like the classic miserable failure query (http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/article.php/3296101) where a search for those terms can bring up web sites about George W. Bush or Michael Moore, due to link bombing (some say Google bombing, but I prefer the term link bombing, since these bombs can go off on search engines other than Google).

The different with link bombing names (namebombing?) is that rather than making someone's site rank top for a term, instead a search for someone's name is being made to bring up information the nameholder may not like.

For more on link bombing, see this other forum thread: Change To Link Bomb Sign Of New Link Analysis Shift? (http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=700)

In this thread, please feel free to discuss these type of issues as they relate to someone's name. Should namebombing someone's name be allowed? Are there legal issues -- trademark law might be iffy, but how about libel law (Google itself was apparently once sued (http://searchenginewatch.com/resources/article.php/2156541#libel) over this)? How can you prevent it, if you don't like it? What impact does it have on search relevancy?

This thread is not meant to be a dissection of the particular issue between seobook and everyman (if you want their viewpoints, see Everyman's here (http://www.google-watch.org/gaming.html#case2) and seobook's here (http://www.aaronwall.com/archives/000365.html)). If you find it relevant to touch on certain aspects of that particular case to explain particular points, go ahead. But it's going to be far more productive to everyone to focus on the issue overall.

>>Mr. Wall thought it was very amusing when I objected to his page

I thought it was very amusing as well, If he'd just gone about it in a less confrontational manner the matter would be dead and buried.

>>name bombing

I dont beleive that was the intention, but then if your site is regarded by the engines as being more important than another site, then surely it is the engines doing that causes such a result?

I wouldnt hesitate to use someones name on my site, I do so on a regular basis. Why would I stop doing that just because I may come up in the SERPS before their own site? - laughable really.

The whole debate could have been over in hours. Why was it dragged out so long and so bitterly? - I think this quote says a lot:


Please be informed that your form to my site at http://www.seobook.com/archives/000415.shtml
has been blocked by me based on the referrer.

these are the reasons:

1. The title is objectionable to me. The title reads "The Daniel Brandt
Toolbar : SEO Book.com". Now a search for "Daniel Brandt" appears at number 3 in Google and number 6 in Yahoo. It associates me with SEO. I do not do SEO. I am a tax-exempt nonprofit and do not wish to be associated with SEO.

2. You state that "For those who want the good data without letting people know who they are. Get Google PageRank, Yahoo! Backlinks, & Alexa traffic
rating while remaining a secret squirrel." This attracts SEO types to the use of this tool. While I have a limit per hour on the tool per IP address,
I prefer not to make it attractive to SEO types because they run out their limit rapidly.

3. The tool is in a delicate state. A PageRank checksum change may soon break the PageRank portion. Yahoo appears to have some sort of IP throttling in place that returns error messages for too many requests coming in from my single IP. Alexa apparently doesn't like scraping, because they go to a little bit of trouble to hide the number on their
page by inserting bogus codes between the digits. In other words, I don't care to attract the wrong kind of attention to this tool.

4. By using the tool from your site, the user sidesteps the page of explanation I have at www.microsoft-watch.org/cgi-bin/ranking.htm
The purpose of this tool is to educate web users about search engines and web traffic. This page you sidestep serves this purpose, but your link to the tool does not.

5. While the scraping can be justified by a nonprofit pursuing an educational objective as "fair use," assuming the load on the scraped sites is negligible, it is more difficult to justify scraping from a site like yours. However, because you've hijacked my form, the user on your site is able to shift the responsibility from you to me.

6. You are using my tool to sell your book


Couldnt you just have asked seobook to either not link to you or to link to your 'education page'? - Forgive my bluntness, but there's a right way and a wrong way to go about communicating ones desires. That is the wrong way IMO

Since the most effective ranking factor is targeted link text these days, the idea that namebombing should not be allowed would be like saying that targeting names in link text shouldn't be allowed. It's the same thing - get targeted link text until the page ranks highly enough. Where could anyone draw a line between normal link text targeting and bombing?

Unlike the other thread where ads were the issue, targeting a name by promoting a page that is against the target person, and possibly harmful to him/her, is acceptable. Traffic Power isn't a personal name, but it would be a good thing to promote a page to the top just to warn people about that company. I don't see any difference between targeting a company and targeting a name.

That was a lot of questions, Danny - but I'll try and adress a few :)

First of all I think it has to do with purpose and relevancy. Let's take the purpose first, as I don't think thats been covered so well ...

There can be many reasons a name is being targeted - or even linkbombed, some of them could be:


Commercial interests - not related to the target name (this is what I would call blatant abuse)
Commercial interests - related to the target name (for example an interview with a certain person in my online newspaper)
Hate or terror (true or untrue)
Fun (for example as a birthday present or practical joke pulled on someone for friendly reasons)



To take the last first: I think there should be room for fun - I don't se any reason why not. Also I think we have to accept certain kind of "hate sites" and therefore also that they might end up in the top of result pages. Off course, those sites have to stay within the limit of the law (in whatever region it operates) but most places I know of you are allowed to be pretty critical as long as you don't claim things that are pure lies. The key for me here is relevancy! Even if I don't particular like a specific hate site it can certainly be relevant for a "name" query. And if there are enough people out there that hate this "name" as much as the site owner it's very likely it will end up with a lot o inbound links. Even better if the site uses RSS :)

But let's say it's a militant feministic hate site (sorry, just a bad example :)) - a site dedicated to the hate to all men. I would not find it acceptable if they namebombed - or just targeted, random names such as "Chris Sherman" or "Danny Sullivan". Just because they are men dosn't make their names relevant for this website (not unless they put up a specific page about those two and why they are such good examples of terrible men :eek: )

When it comes to commercial interests I find it more tricky. Basically I think that if you have the right to use the name in your product you will have the right to use the name in your marketing - unless, that is, your suppliers have it in the conctract that you are not allowed to do so (the affiliate limitations discussed in another thread).

I think there are legal as well as ethical reasons to stay within that limit.

Ethics is a bitch but it tend to kick back when you least want it. As stated before I am not a big moralist but you should be aware that once you cross that invisible line you can't be sure how other people might react. They may go "unethical" on you too - but in other ways than you. Ways you may not like. You basically open up a whole new ball game you may not want to play.

From a legal point of view I think the most important thing to say is that you may be liable under other laws than your own country's. For example, if you market your site, and sell to, Europe then you are liable to our marketing laws. I am not a lawyer and I don't think we should go into a deep legal discussion in this thread but I just urge you to check with a good International lawyer if you are doing "border line marketing" and if you target regions outside your own.

>> dubbed namebombing

Danny Sullivan coins yet another SEO phrase.

one additional linkbomb possiblity not mentioned above is that a person finds something interesting and links to it and many third parties link at the middle site using the name of the first site owner in the link text.

without me actively promoting that initial daniel brandt toolbar page in any way it ranked at #3 on its own merit...from googlebombing / namebombing by random bloggers not named Aaron.

Sorry guy, but i just fail to find this anything more than an interesting diversion.

It's the engines that decide how pages rank regardless of websites intentions. If people dont rank for their own names, what should we do? All sue Google? - hardly.... (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=nick+w&btnG=Search)

Nick

Sorry guy, but i just fail to find this anything more than an interesting diversion.

It's the engines that decide how pages rank regardless of websites intentions. If people dont rank for their own names, what should we do? All sue Google? - hardly.... (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=nick+w&btnG=Search)

Nick
It appears as though this very forum is NameBombing you Nick :eek:

>instead a search for someone's name is being made to bring up information the nameholder may not like.

And long may that continue.

As long as the information isn't libel, which I think mostly means false and malicious, then people have a right to speaK. Some may write letters to newspapers, some may print flyers, some may make a web page and use whatever knowledge they have to bring it to a wider audiance.

>If you find it relevant to touch on certain aspects of that particular case to explain particular points, go ahead.

I find it highly amusing that the claimed "wounded party" is this case makes a living from "a search for someone's name is being made to bring up information the nameholder may not like".

I asked these questions the other day to a law firm. Here is what they said and I agree.

1. if S targets the name of X without consulting with X, and
2. if S targets the name of X for monetary gain (promote his/her products or service)

Then

(a) S is not any different than a vulgar spammer.
(b) S must be classified as a name-spammer.

Don't waste your time arguying with S. Proceed as follows

1. Ask S to stop the above via a notarized Cease and Desist (with copy to S's ISP).
2. If S ignores the CD then try this

(a) file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for spamming, misleading consumers, unfair trade practices, and tortious interference. This costs nothing.
(b) Contact a law firm to handle to S a civil lawsuit. This may cost you.

Other than this, I don't see other way to stop S from targeting X.

If someone is interested, he/she can ask the FTC to look into the recent phenomenon of name-spamming (name-bombing).

Orion

>1. if S targets the name of X without consulting with X, and

Replace "targets" with "writes about". Are you saying you need someones permission to write about them?

>2. if S targets the name of X for monetary gain (promote his/her products or service)

Replace "targets" with "writes about". That puts just about every newspaper and magazine out of business. No more TV or radio too I guess.

one additional linkbomb possiblity not mentioned above is that a person finds something interesting and links to it and many third parties link at the middle site using the name of the first site owner in the link text. without me actively promoting that initial daniel brandt toolbar page in any way it ranked at #3 on its own merit...from googlebombing / namebombing by random bloggers not named Aaron.
True, this is a possibility, particularly if the first blogger brands his post with a namebomb in the title and links. In this particular case, I find only three links from other sites that have my name mentioned, using a backlink check on Yahoo. In one case my name is not in anchor text, and the other two cases may have been picked up automatically since they appear to be something like directory listings.

Blogging is viral, as you well know. Numerous directory-type sites scan RSS feeds, and I assume this is what happened. You're the expert here. I've seen mirror copies of some of your pages on other sites on the web. One example is a site that claims to make a page child-safe if you submit a URL. In this case, Yahoo picked up your content from that child-safe site and counted that new URL as a backlink to your content.

My guess is that you aren't worried about children, but you are an expert at viral linking. I see Google as primarily at fault for the sorry situation they've created that has blogs ranking so well.


I find it highly amusing that the claimed "wounded party" is this case makes a living from "a search for someone's name is being made to bring up information the nameholder may not like".
I cite investigative books and newspaper clippings where the name appears. Twice in twenty years I've been notified that particular pages in a book cited by me were retracted by the publisher after legal action, and I took out that particular citation. The role of investigative journalism cannot be equated with selling ebooks for private profit. No serious person would advocate that journalists be forbidden from ever naming names, and no serious person would recommend that written history be destroyed to protect those who have been named by journalists in the past.

Journalism performs a necessary social function. Search engine marketing does not.

Journalism performs a necessary social function. Search engine marketing does not.

It rather depend on your defintion of jounalism, quite frankly i find it hard to categorize you as a jounalist. I've always considered you an SEO

>i count 3

I count 4

Nick

>Journalism performs a necessary social function. Search engine marketing does not.

I agree to an extent, but I have a rather narrow definition of search engine marketing.

I think that SEO on the other hand is the "new journalism", it can enable and enpower many writers who may not have had the oppertuinity to be "published".

Where I come from the best that most could hope for was a life down the pits [deep coal mines]...then they closed all the pits. It wasn't a future of university, english degrees and journalism.

What SEO offers people like me is the ability to publish and_also_be_read. If that means some people get upset, if that means that some things I write will "rank" higher than the thing I am writing about then I think that is a very, very, very good thing.

>1. if S targets the name of X without consulting with X, and

Replace "targets" with "writes about". Are you saying you need someones permission to write about them?

>2. if S targets the name of X for monetary gain (promote his/her products or service)

Replace "targets" with "writes about". That puts just about every newspaper and magazine out of business. No more TV or radio too I guess.

I believe this is something to be interpreted in the court of law. I just contacted the FTC regarding this recent phenomenon of name-spamming (name-bombing) and asked to look into the matter.

Orion

It rather depend on your defintion of jounalism, quite frankly i find it hard to categorize you as a jounalist. I've always considered you an SEO
>i count 3
I count 4
Nick

Yes, four -- now that you've linked to seobook on your site with my name in the anchor text. Very cute.

That's the whole point, isn't it? I can be a social activist since 1967, and build an index of investigative journalism for the last 23 years, and then someone does a search in Google and discovers, thanks to you and Aaron, that all I really am is just another search engine marketer!

Now do you understand why I'm concerned about Google and interested in search engines generally? I'm not marketer like you. Rather, I'm extending my activism to new issues that have serious social consequences.

>>Very cute.

Glad you thought so, i can respect a man that can look at the funny side of things he finds serious in nature. Pop in anytime :)

Now do you understand why I'm concerned about Google and interested in search engines generally?

Whilst not as concerned as you clearly are, i actually share more than a few of your concerns. Not this particular one however.

Going back to Orions post, nah... dont be silly mate! :eek: :)
As NFFC pointed out, that just makes a mockery of free speech, journalism and western culture in general.

er.. ok, he didnt say that, but you know what i mean...

Nick

I just contacted the FTC regarding this recent phenomenon of name-spamming (name-bombing) and asked to look into the matter

Really? - Orion, serious question: How would you argue that it's the individual at fault rather than the search engine that controls the way it ranks pages?

Nick

I can be a social activist since 1967, and build an index of investigative journalism for the last 23 years, and then someone does a search in Google and discovers, thanks to you and Aaron, that all I really am is just another search engine marketer!

Now do you understand why I'm concerned about Google and interested in search engines generally? I'm not marketer like you. Rather, I'm extending my activism to new issues that have serious social consequences.
1.) if you did not use phrases such as "just another search engine marketer" perhaps more search engine marketers would see things from your worldview. when you discount others they stand a good chance to discount you.
2.) many marketers use marketing for social causes they believe in.

>> dubbed namebombing

Danny Sullivan coins yet another SEO phrase.
Yes - it's called Dannybombing. :D

I believe this is something to be interpreted in the court of law. I just contacted the FTC regarding this recent phenomenon of name-spamming (name-bombing) and asked to look into the matter.

Orion

As a blogger in America :eek: I think I'm going to stand on my 1st Amendment rights. If I want to start a post about some person, place, thing, entity and link to a specific page I jolly well will. And I'll order the words in my title tags any way I want too. ;) I'm not sure the FTC has anything to say about it.

I'm also not sure the term "spamming" and "spammer" are used any better here than they were in those whitehat/blackhat threads. It's skirting close to name calling.

>>It's skirting close to name calling

nah... that *is* name calling in my book. One would expect better behaviour.

Nonsense, clearly.

Nick

It's an oddity that those who are first to do something (i.e. target a person or group of people) are often the first to complain about it when they think it's done to them.. If it's okay to assign a derogatory search phrase to a page of names:

http://www.webpronews.com/news/ebusinessnews/wpn-45-20040325AnotherGooglebombExplodes.html
http://news.softpedia.com/news/2/2004/March/7639.shtml
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=%22out+of+touch+executives%22&btnG=Google+Search
http://search.yahoo.com/search?fr=fp-pull-web-t&p=out+of+touch+executives

What possible reason could there be to complain about a search phrase of a name being made to point to a page the name holder feels is negative?

Now you are just grasping at straws, Chris. I was trying to raise the issue of Google bombing in a manner that would attract Google's attention. I succeeded. The New York Times noticed, and so did Google. My whole point was that anchor text juice is such a distorting influence in Google's index that they ought to do something about it.

Unfortunately, Google didn't address the problem except to hand tweak their index so that their particular page was insensitive to my particular bomb. This is explained in the long thread linked by Danny in the first post above, "Change To Link Bomb Sign Of New Link Analysis Shift?"

Proving once again, for me at least, that Google has little interest in not being evil. By the way, I hope you don't mind that your name made it into Google Watch (http://www.google-watch.org/gaming.html#case2).

Now you are just grasping at straws, Chris. I was trying to raise the issue of Google bombing in a manner that would attract Google's attention. I succeeded. The New York Times noticed, and so did Google. My whole point was that anchor text juice is such a distorting influence in Google's index that they ought to do something about it.
why did you select the phrase "out of touch executives" then? why not use some other phrase like "Daniel Brandt Googlebombed this Google Page"

Proving once again, for me at least, that Google has little interest in not being evil. By the way, I hope you don't mind that your name made it into Google Watch (http://www.google-watch.org/gaming.html#case2).
I love the title of this page
http://www.google-watch.org/gaming.html
it is almost as if you are trying an Aaron Wall namebomb there :)
ranking #12 in Google currently
you just got caught with your hand in the cookie jar
you just took all credibility away from your complaint with that

a free tip: you need to change the anchor text on your site too if you want it to work (I thought you knew how Googlebombs work?). I doubt you will rank above #4 though as the top 3 sites got many aaron wall links pointing at them.

what kind of 'journalist' adds stuff to his articles and later renames them (exclusively to manipulate search results) because he dislikes someone?

Daniel, I don't care why you did it. It's either right or it isn't, you can't have it both ways. I'm merely indicating that there isn't much ethical difference between assigning words to a page about particular people and assigning a particular persons name to a page.

I say ethical because I don't believe there is a legal issue here unless the resultant page says something libellous. Besides, enforcing across geographical boundaries would be difficult.

By the way, I hope you don't mind that your name made it into Google Watch

I warn it. I say "name, these are the places where you shouldn't and shouldn't go". But honestly, once it gets to its teenage years I have very little chance of preventing it from going where it wants to go. If you could give it a slap and send it right back home without supper that'd be great, thanks.

>>Google has little interest in not being evil

that sentence, and the rather silly Aaron wall title on the page seobook linked to say it all for me.

Im a big animal rights fan, not overly so, but I beleive it's important. When I see idiots on the TV demonstrating by taping their gonads to laboratories or whatever other fool things they do, it just makes me cringe.

How dare they make a mockery of a good cause with stupid actions, and juvenile rhetoric?

As I said earlier, i actually support more of your concerns than you may think. But it saddens me to say that I get a very similar feeling to the animal rights thing everytime I see you post somthing like that... :(

You dont come across as being serious. Just bitter.

It's a shame really, some of your points are very important, if you could only articulate them in a less fanatical fashion......

Nick

some of your points are very important,

Everyman, I have to agree with Nick, I have a lot of sympathy for many of your privacy concerns about Google and search engines in general. But I'm not sure that SEO's are the enemy you imagine. :)


I'm not a big fan of Google bombing by bloggers, and namebombing never really occurred to me until Danny coined the phrase. But I don't think we can restrict how bloggers and webmasters title their pages, forum posts, and news headlines. I don't think those things can be "widgetised". Luddite that I am, I would love to see search go back to indexing sites instead of pages but that is just not going to happen, so *bombing is only going to get more frequent.

The other point is linking. Google tries to control linking on the web via their rewards and punishment system. I hate that. The Web is a public place, therefore my general attitude is don't publish to the web if you don't want it linked to. Or put it behind a password protection. Otherwise it is just like a radio signal on the public airwaves, once it is broadcast it is subject to interception.

A reminder from my original post:

This thread is not meant to be a dissection of the particular issue between seobook and everyman (if you want their viewpoints, see Everyman's here and seobook's here). If you find it relevant to touch on certain aspects of that particular case to explain particular points, go ahead. But it's going to be far more productive to everyone to focus on the issue overall.

Despite this, I think we've had plenty of dissection between the situation between Daniel and Aaron. And some of that's been useful. But let's now move on to some more discussion of the namebombing issue in general, or at least some other good examples besides this one.

Really? - Orion, serious question: How would you argue that it's the individual at fault rather than the search engine that controls the way it ranks pages?

Nick
Apart from The Federal Trade Commission - I would have thought the FCC would have made a better source of communicating a miss use of a communicatiuon channel.

But let's now move on to some more discussion of the namebombing issue in general, or at least some other good examples besides this one.
just as you can assign any page a reputation (ie waffles or horrible failure) you can also rank well for anything you write about. there are a ton of sites way more powerfully than my sites that could absolutely crush my sites for any term they chose...even my name.

Also sometimes it happens on accident. If you have ever seen any person or product a site like Lockergnome or Boing Boing mentions that post can easily just get a first page ranking based exclusively on how powerful those sites are (let alone of other bloggers decide to syndicate and link it up).

One way or another through the opinions of various algorithms and community feedback people earn some amount of trust. they can only misuse or abuse that trust so much before it comes back to bite them and they start losing that trust. IMHO it is a self regulating system.

Libel is obviously wrong, but that is an entirely different issue. The web makes possible feedback that was not easily available...all sides of any issue. To say that community feedback that you disagree with is wrong is to say that the entire web is wrong.

People will write lots of nasty stuff about anyone in the public eye. You can't change any social norms or challenge anything in this world or speak you mind or stick out in any way without expecting any criticism (I have got boatloads of it recently).

The web is all about expression and we are all different.

Do (or should) the rules a SE follows change depending on whether or not the person (or company) targeted is targeted via AdWords or the regular SERPS?

Google (and other SE's) have a high level of control over their advertising.

Typically, they have very little control over a specific SERP, but rather exercise that control via a universally applied algo - which may provide good or bad results depending on the actual query.

I would argue that your responsibility, which DOES apply to all your actions, does go up and down depending on the level of control over those actions.

Here is an actual example I remember from law school. A home or business owner does not own, and can't really control, what happens on the sidewalk in front of their place, except in unusual circumstances. The same applies to a shopping mall - the store owners are not responsible if someone happens to slip and fall in front of their store (unless they were responsible by spilling something, for example).

There was a case where a worker was on ladder outside of the store putting up signs and the shop owner went out and asked them to move. Shortly thereafter, the worker fell. The court held that by exerting control over the situation, the shop owner had created a liability where none had existed before.

So, control = responsibility. The issue would then be, does a search engine exert enough control over a *specific* SERP to make it responsible for the result?

It certainly exerts control over the algo in general, but how about specifically?

I would imagine that in the case of a *specific* result, the owners of the sites in question (and their SEO's) may well exert more control than the SE, if only by virtue of being the ones providing the content.

Arguably (and I don't hold a strong position on this, I'm just throwing it out as an idea) Google should be responsible for the General issues with it's SERPS (i.e. the fact that googlebombs work in the first place) but that the individuals doing the bombing are primarily responsible for the Specific instance and specific result.

So it's possible you could sue an SE because you *can* be bombed, but not because you *were* bombed. In practice, there may not be a big difference in an individual case, but I think it's important to make the distinction.

My opinion,
Ian

Google is responsible for Google bombing, but refuses to acknowledge their responsibility. They downplay the significance of Google bombs whenever the press asks about them:

Craig Silverstein, Google's director for technology, says the company sees nothing wrong with the public using its search engine this way. No user is hurt, he said, because there is no clearly legitimate site for "miserable failure" being pushed aside. Moreover, he said, Google's results were taking stock of the range of opinions that are expressed online. "We just reflect the opinion on the Web," he said, "for better or worse." -- International Herald Tribune, December 9, 2003

PLAYBOY: How do you fight Google bombing, a tactic some people use to manipulate search results by linking words? For instance, if they have their way, the query "world's dumbest man" might lead you to the White House web page.

BRIN: That's in a different category. We call it spam but not in the sense of e-mail. People try to make political statements using search results. They want to affect the results when you search for something obscure and specific, say "French military victories." They get tons of people to link the phrase to a website that pushes their political point of view. These queries are rare. The number of people interested in French military victories is tiny. There may be no other websites dedicated to that topic, so people create a page with the idea of controlling a message.

PAGE: People do it because it's like discovering fire: "We can affect the web!" Well, you are the web, so of course you can affect it.

BRIN: Typically Google bombs don't affect people looking for information.

PAGE: They're more like entertainment. -- Playboy, September, 2004

When Google isn't busy downplaying Google bombs, then they are busy hyping the objectivity of their algorithms:

Google Inc., the leading Internet search engine, said Monday that it had no plans to alter its search results despite complaints that the first listing on a search for the word "Jew" directs people to an anti-Semitic Web site.... The company, which is based in Mountain View, Calif., said it had no plans to remove the site from the search results list because it trusts its automated program to rank Web sites accurately. The search engine has been listing "Jewwatch.com" as the first-ranked site for three years. "We find this result offensive, but the objectivity of our ranking function prevents us from making any changes," said David Krane, a spokesman for Google, adding that an exception is made only in cases where a site is illegal. -- New York Times, April 13, 2004

Bad Google. Maybe they should go to prison and learn some manners from Martha Stewart.

The next question is, "Since Google is all-powerful and it will take years before they're forced to act, should webmasters, in the meantime, try to avoid taking advantage of, and profiting from, Google's known weaknesses at the expense of others?"

"The more an owner, for his advantage, opens up his property for use by the public in general, the more do his rights become circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who use it." -- Justice Hugo Black, Marsh v. Alabama, 326 U.S. 501 (1946)

the same technique works in engines other than Google.

see Yahoo! ...

its a problem with the infancy of search in general.

the same technique works in engines other than Google.
see Yahoo! ...
its a problem with the infancy of search in general.
True enough. Namebombing is like taking candy from a baby.

The next question is, "Since Google is all-powerful and it will take years before they're forced to act, should webmasters, in the meantime, try to avoid taking advantage of, and profiting from, Google's known weaknesses at the expense of others?"

It sounds like you are asking us (and any webmaster) to stop doing SEO. Everything we do exploit Google's weaknesses in one way or another and it will allways be at the expense of someone else - someone that rank lower because we do better. There are simplky not room for every great site on the first page and in many cases far more than 10 "deserve" to be there but I am not going to back out of the game because of that. My clients often have just as much right to be on the first page as others and off course I will use any tactics known to me, within the law and within the ethical limits of me and any specific client.

I have a personal issue with most namebombing and people abusing others brands for their own gain but that dosn't extent into a general mistrust in all SEO and SEOs

It sounds like you are asking us (and any webmaster) to stop doing SEO. Everything we do exploit Google's weaknesses in one way or another and it will allways be at the expense of someone else - someone that rank lower because we do better. There are simplky not room for every great site on the first page and in many cases far more than 10 "deserve" to be there but I am not going to back out of the game because of that. My clients often have just as much right to be on the first page as others and off course I will use any tactics known to me, within the law and within the ethical limits of me and any specific client.

I have a personal issue with most namebombing and people abusing others brands for their own gain but that dosn't extent into a general mistrust in all SEO and SEOs
Healthy outlook... laissez-faire optimization

The problem is that so-called name-bombing performs a very important role in determining the worth of a page - and it should.

The fact that it's being misused and can be manipulated makes it absolutely no different from on-page content, metatags, internal links, authority links, and just about everything else that an algo can use to rank a page.

I mean - they have to use *something*! Else, why have a search engine in the first place?

Example: do a search for "coffee". You will see Starbucks at the top. Surprising? No. Now look at googles cache for the site. Go ahead, I'll wait.....

What did you see? Did you see the word coffee anywhere?

And yet it is a good and accurate result.

Now, the whole "rage against the machine" is all well and good, but frankly I expect people who complain about something to have an answer or alternative ready. And I expect that answer or alternative to actually be workable.

Otherwise, it's just digital graffiti and bad vibes. It's not helpful.

So, let’s get rid of looking at content, since of course that can be spammed. And we should not count incoming links because they are too easy to buy, and now since it's possible to put non-relevant copy into incoming links we should not use it?
What, exactly, does that leave us with?

Feel free to propose a method that a search engine could use that would allow a Flash site or Starbucks to show up properly. And remember that a search engine can't go over and force anyone to re-write their site.

Sometimes you have to take the good with the bad. Yes, I think incoming link text could (and should) be looked at more carefully. But I don't believe that one should throw out the baby with the bathwater.

I'd be happy to hear people's thoughts on how the negative effects of link-bombing could be minimized while keeping the positive aspects of link text. That, at least, would be productive time spent.

My personal opinion,

Ian