In an apparent attack to his administration, US President Barack Obama today fell victim to a Google bomb when the Google search result for the phrase “worst failure ever” returns his official biography from the White House web site as the number one result.

You can not find the phrase “worst failure ever” anywhere on Barack Obama’s biography page but how did it became the number one Google search result for that not really cool phrase?

I’m not claiming to be an expert but I have enough WWW knowledge to know how it’s done. Here’s how:

Due to the way Google’s page rank algorithm works, a web site or a web page will be ranked higher for a certain word or phrase if a significant number of web sites or web pages linked to it using that certain word or phrase as the anchor text. Because of that, Google will think that web site or web page is important relative to that certain word or phrase.

Confused?

I’ll use this web site as an example. You can not find the phrase “Hakuna Matata!” anywhere on my home page except of course on my header image, but Google can’t read the texts on an image. What I did was I requested some of my blogger friends to use the phrase “Hakuna Matata!” as the anchor text when linking to my web site on their blog rolls. As a result, this web site is in the second page of the results when you type “Hakuna Matata” on Google search. That’s considering that there 1.8 million web sites and web pages competing for that phrase. I know I’ll hit first page soon.

Another example is for the phrase “click here”. Do you know what web site is number one on the SERPs (search engine results page) for that? Surprise, surprise! It’s for the download page of Adobe Reader. You can’t find the phrase anywhere on the page but because there are thousands of web sites linking to it using “click here” as the anchor text, it’s no surprise that it’s number one. Like this: to be able to read PDF files, click here.

So if you want your site to rank high for the phrase “make money online” or “the greatest” or whatever, you now know what to do.

A Google bomb can be destructive but can be constructive as well. Some are even cool just like an easter egg.

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Tags: barack obama, google, SEO