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 Are Your Inbound Links Working For or Against You?

Have you heard of the Google ‘miserable failure’ trick? Until recently, a search for the term 'miserable failure' in Google would display the Whitehouse biography page for President George W. Bush in the first position. Have you ever wondered how that can be?

'GoogleBombing' is a term coined to describe the how search engine results are influenced by the existence of numerous links using a dominant phrase in the anchor text, which is the word or phrase that is usually underlined to actually create the link. In this case, many high profile anti-Bush web pages linked to President Bush’s bio page using the phrase “miserable failure”. Until recently, the anchor text used in incoming links played a large role in a page’s ability to rank for that term. The theory is this; if a large enough number of pages cite Lance Armstrong as a “couch potato” where the link takes you to his home page, eventually, www.lancearmstrong.com will be listed number one in a search for ‘couch potato’, no matter how contrary to the truth.

The Links Solution…

Google has answered this by looking for numerous numbers of links created with the same anchor text. Unfortunately, many inexperienced search engine optimization professionals build links to their clients’ pages using just a few keyword phrases. As is the case with the now damaging ‘over-optimization penalty’, where if you use too many keywords on a page, you are penalized, there can easily be too much of a good thing. While a similar adjustment is yet to be adopted by Yahoo or Microsoft Live, they won’t be far behind.