Well George Bush may no longer be a ‘Miserable Failure’ (in the search engines at least), but that most quintessential of Irish Google Bombs still retains it’s rank.

Yes, Comreg is still ranking #1 for searches on the phrase ‘Telecoms Poodle‘ (and if you don’t believe me try linking to it yourself :mrgreen:).

I noticed James Corbett linking to my story and lamenting the loss of the ‘Telecoms Poodle‘ bomb (as it turns James is a wee bit premature). It got me to thinking as to how Google might be filtering these ‘attacks’?

Is relevancy the key to the Bomb Filter?

There is a tad bit of discussion going on (see the commentary on Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim blog – one for your reader also) and it has got me thinking how the filter might actual kick in.

First off I wouldn’t know an algorithm if it licked me in the face. But here’s my best guess at what Google might be doing to filter out the Bombs.

Google constantly crawls the web looking for new content and new hyperlinks. As the volume of same-anchor hyperlinks pointing at any one object increases a threshold may be reached which triggers a flag.

I would imagine that relevancy checks are then carried out on both the target object and originating objects to see if:

1. the originating object (the page publishing the link) is relevant to the target;
2. the originating object is relevant to other originating objects;
3. the anchor used has relevancy with respect to the originating object;
4. the anchor used has relevancy with respect to the originating website;
5. the anchor used has relevancy with respect to the target object;
6. the anchor used has relevancy with respect to the target website.

In situations where enough originating objects fail the above tests Google may then filter the target object from search results on the target anchor text.

But I do find it interesting that the ‘Telecoms Poodle‘ is still live and well.

Why might this be? Well firstly, the anchor contains the word ‘telecoms’ which is highly relevant for the target. ‘Telecoms’ is probably also relevant for many of the sites that bombed ComReg (many of the bloggers involved are commenting on the Broadband problems we have here in Ireland). I imagine also that the relatively small size of Ireland’s blogging community makes many of the originating sites relevant to each other (quite a small close-knit circle involved in the bomb).

If I am right it might still be possible to bomb phrases – the key would be to link using semi-relevant anchors, and publish those anchors on sites that share high relevance with the target site and each other.

Of course all the above is simply me speculating. The chances I’m completely wrong? I imagine quite high.