Remember the good old days of Google Bombing? Back when George W Bush’s bio page at the White House was ranked #1 for “miserable failure”? Well, this is something we haven’t seen for a while, and it is largely thought that this practice would no longer work, but as the Vatican reported to Google a few days ago, it still does.
A search for “Holy See” now brings up the Vatican’s website in the first spot at Google, just as it always has, but for a brief period, the religious site was overtaken by a site on pedophilia! It appears that pedofilo.com used Google bombing to jump to the first position in Google. A representative from the Vatican contacted Google and ultimately the offending site was removed from the search results (it also appears to be offline at the time of this writing).
“Google Bombing” was the practice of directing a massive amount of links towards a single page with a specific unrelated keyword phrase. The large number of links would then in turn cause the page to rank for that irrelevant phrase. Google was to have taken care of this problem years ago, but because of the strong role that links play on search rankings, the practice is, and likely always will be, a possibility on some level if done correctly.