Link bombing

‘Link bombing’ (or Google bombing) is an attempt to influence the ranking of a given page in results returned by the search engine, often with humorous or political intentions.

If you are searching for something, search engines like Google, Ask, and Yahoo! will first find all the pages they think are relevant. Then, crucially, they need to decide which order to display search results in, ie how to rank the pages based on the relevance. One of the most important factors in deciding how relevant particular sites are, is to count how many other sites link to it (backlinks).

Search engines often use the number of backlinks that a website has as one of the factors for determining that website's search engine ranking. For example, Google's PageRank algorithm uses backlinks to help determine a site's rank. Therefore, websites often employ various techniques to increase the number of backlinks pointing to their website and to boost their page ranks. The more references, or links there are to a site, the more important it is deemed to be.

Because lots of people quote and link the Wikipedia website, for example, the Wikipedia site is seen as relevant and a good hit. That is why the site ranks quite highly for many search terms.

Thus in theory you could get your own site listed at the top for very targeted keywords using the same technique. This presents an opportunity for people to exploit this fact, and to create a "link bomb". They may encourage thousands of their peers to include a link to a particular page for some particular phrase/words. For eg. Link bombers had the Bush homepage in their blogs, and labeled it "miserable failure", as a result whenever one searches for ‘miserable failure’ due to the huge number of backlinks to the Bush homepage, the main search engine algorithms were fooled into thinking this was a relevant result for that search term, and Bush was driven to the top of the rankings. Mr Bush had been link bombed.