Anti-Google-Bomb

Google-bombs are created by purposely linking a wide array of web pages to one site via a specific set of keywords. This has the effect of giving the linked site a very high ranking in any Google search results for the specified keywords.

Whether they’re used for comedic effect or guerilla advertising, Google-bombs are destructive to the structure of the web and look to be growing in both use and popularity. This is my proposal to curb the destructive effects of Google-bombing.

At the heart of my solution is the notion of information versus opinion. Links which point to a page using terms found within the content of that page would be considered “Information”, links which point to content using other terms would then be classified as “Opinion”. Thus by only counting informative links in a page’s rank, Google could eliminate some of the negative effects of Google-bombs.

Effectively, this approach gives webmasters the ability to specify which terms can be used to link to their pages without actually being able to censor foreign content. For example, people could link to a negative review of a product using the name of the product and have that review show up, as it should, in Google. However, linking to the product page using the term “piece of crap” would not be recognized by Google.