How to GoogleBomb Your Friends and Enemies

Have you ever Googled yourself? No no, we mean the search engine– have you ever typed your own name into Google to see the results? Chances are you certainly have, just as most web savvy people have at some point in the recent past. What many readers may not know is that there are ways of manipulating what you see in search results for names, phrases and other words. In the web marketing world, this is referred to as “Search Engine Optimization”, although many “SEO’s” may frown on that word “manipulation”. While this process can be used for good, it can also be used for a lot of fun at the expense of your friends and enemies alike. Keep reading, GearCravers, to learn about the Art of Googlebombing, and how manipulate google to give your enemies some rather ugly search results…

Wikipedia defines the Google Bomb as “Internet slang for a certain kind of attempt to influence the ranking of a given page in results returned by the Google search engine, often with humorous or political intentions.” This works by driving a large number of links to a single site, using the desired Google Bomb phrase as the text of the link. If you were to send a few hundred links to GearCrave with the phrase “the coolest site in the history of the internet” in the link, Google would likely rank GearCrave as a top search result when that phrase is queried. There are a few other elements that go into this technique, all of which will be covered below.

The most famous GoogleBomb to date was “miserable failure”, a GoogleBomb that targeted the phrase “miserable failure” and pointed it toward George W. Bush’s biography on the White House website. If you typed that term and hit the first result, you’d be staring face-to-face with what thousands of website owners, hackers and SEOs consider to be the great miserable failure cataloged in Google’s Index. Years later, Google updated their algorithm to prevent GoogleBombs from working, and now “miserable failure” points elsewhere, as do most of the famous GoogleBombs to date. A few still remain, like one for ex-Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, who openly compared homosexuality to beastiality. Take a look at where a google search for “Santorum” gets you…

While Google did its best to prevent GoogleBombing, it is still possible on a small scale– namely with your own personal friends and enemies. Continue reading to find out how!

First, you need to find a web page you can target with the phrase or name of your choice. This can be a friend or an enemies website, or a different website you want to associate with your friend’s name. There are essentially two ways to do this: 1) you can target your friend’s website with a nasty phrase or 2) you can target a nasty website with your friend’s name. The former is a lot more harmless than the latter, as version two can make prospective employers scratch their heads about what your friend’s name brings up in google.

Let’s say you want to target your friend’s website. Select a phrase like “colossal douchebox”. This way, if you type that phrase into google, their site would be the number one listing for the phrase “colossal douchebox”. This is a joke you can share between you and your friends, but no one else will likely see. If you’re feeling a little more malicious, you can select a nasty website: like the National Man/Boy Love Association (or NAMBLA). Then take your friend’s name, for example “Alias McGooberdouche” and use that as the target phrase to point to the NAMBLA website.

Keep in mind that the more common the name of your friend/enemy, the more difficult it will be to GoogleBomb. If your friend’s name is Joe Smith, you might want to consider the other type of GoogleBombing, where you point an insult toward your friend’s website.

Last, if your friend doesn’t have a website, why not set up one as a joke? Its free an easy with services from Wordpress Hosted and Blogger.

Next, we need to get links to point toward our target website, using the phrase we’ve selected as that link’s text. There are three primary ways to get the links we want with the text we want: 1) Website Directories, 2) Soliciting Links, and 3) Spamming (although, of course, we don’t condone this).

1. Website Directories: there are thousands of directories all over the web that you can submit a website to, and that directory will then link to your website. There are also services which will submit your website of choice on the cheap.

• For $10, you can use services like Seoster.com to submit to 100 directories on your behalf.
• At the end of a week or two, Seoster will have your target site listed in 100 directories using the keyword target of your choice

2. Soliciting Links: this will likely be the most effective method, but also the most laborious. Starting with friends, family and co-workers who maintain websites and blogs, ask them to place a link on their site to your target website using your phrase of choice. Next, you can go to websites and blogs who you think might get a laugh out of your prank and ask them to join you. Email webmasters, but keep them brief– and we suggest only trying personal blogs of people you think might enjoy this prank.
3. Spamming: as we said, we don’t condone spamming. In fact, you could get in a lot of trouble doing it. We’ll only share one way people may have done this in the past, and that is by using Splogs, or brainless spam blogs set up on sites like Blogger that have no original content, just a link or two to other websites. While we are against this, we had to mention it as it has been used for GoogleBombing in the past.

Pro Tip: want to skip all the work and head straight to the fun? Use a Google Adwords account to buy “sponsored links” in Google Search Results. Buy phrases like “colossal douchebox” and aim these links at your friends website. Whenever someone types that phrase, it points directly at your friend. Also, you can buy your friend’s name and link it to another website, like NAMBLA. However, you might find it takes a bit of work to get around google’s AdWords terms, conditions and spam algorithms.

You’ve selected the target website, you’ve chosen the search phrase you want, and you’ve set up a campaign to build links to your target with that phrase.  Google works pretty quickly, so you could begin to see results early on.  If the target website is new, you can expect to wait quite a while.  But if the site is established, you can expect to see a change in Google quite quickly.  Once the results are completed, send your friend an email and ask them to Google “colossal douchebox”.  Or tell your enemy to Google their name and note that the top listing is the NAMBLA website.  After they’ve replied, be prepared to laugh your ass off.  Just be sure not to share this article with your target, you don’t want them to retaliate, do you?  Just share it with everyone else!