Recent Events and Lessons for Webmasters

Two recent events in the news: Microsoft's offer for Yahoo! and the 'Anonymous' group's Google Bomb attack on the scentologists provide both salutary and informative lessons for all webmasters.

Microsoft's recent attempt to take over Yahoo! shows both the vulnerability of web-based companies (Yahoo!'s shares have slid dramatically in recent weeks) whilst also showing how important the internet space is. Yahoo! is one of the most recognized of web brands and Yahoo! dominates many areas of the web sphere. Yahoo's search (though trailing behind Google) is still the second most widely employed on the web. This makes Yahoo! a good fit for Microsoft and also means that Microsoft is after an even larger slice of internet revenue.

These are all hopeful signs for all of us with an internet presence. Both as there's a chance of a company developing that will give Google a run for it's money. Also it indicates that spending on internet advertising will continue to grow and that Microsoft wants a bigger slice of this pie. This projected growth of the internet as a marketplace also has significant implications on how businesses (and most especially small websites) do business on the internet. In a more crowded internet it's the large 'authority' sites who will ultimately triumph over their smaller brethren. This is something I've been saying for many years. Small 'niche' sites may not be dead yet, but their period of usefulness is drawing to a close and it's something that I point out in my eBook Maximize your Website Traffic, which has now been newly updated for 2008.

The other newsworthy event of the past week was the attack perpetrated by the 'anonymous' group on the Scientologists. You can read my analysis of this attack at Simple Techniques Still Work - The Case of a Google Bomb. Wikipedia defines a Google Bomb as:

A Google bomb (also referred to as a 'link bomb') is Internet slang for a certain kind of attempt to influence the ranking of a given page in results returned by the Google search engine, often with humorous or political intentions. Because of the way that Google's algorithm works, a page will be ranked higher if the sites that link to that page use consistent anchor text. A Google bomb is created if a large number of sites link to the page in this manner. Google bomb is used both as a verb and a noun. The phrase "Google bombing" was introduced to the New Oxford American Dictionary in May 2005. Google bombing is closely related to spamdexing, the practice of deliberately modifying HTML pages to increase the chance of their being placed close to the beginning of search engine results, or to influence the category to which the page is assigned in a misleading or dishonest manner.

This is interesting as Google claimed, during 2007 that they had put in place measures that would prevent this kind of attack. This still didn’t prevent the Anonymous group from getting the Church of Scientology ranked third in Google for the term ‘dangerous cult’. Now, I certainly don’t condone this kind of attack. However, the strategies employed (some of them at least) point towards very good learning lessons for internet marketers.

Now, according to Google sites shouldn’t be ranked for a search term if those terms are not actually on the website being pointed at. The interesting thing here is that the term ‘dangerous’ was on the Scientology website, but the term ‘cult’ was not. Thus Scientology should not be ranked for the search term ‘dangerous cult’ — but it was!

The term ‘cult’ was only found in the links pointing towards the website which means that anchor text is still very important in getting a web page ranked for a certain term. The more in-bound links you have with that term in it pointing to your website or web page the more likely you are of being ranked for that search term!

This is interesting as a careful analysis of this 'Google bomb' attack reveals several methods webmasters can use to improve the ranking of their site and to get their sites listed for keywords and terms that are not part of the site's text.

In brief, what the the strategies employed by the ‘Anonymous’ group shows us is that:

• in-bound links are still the most important factor for rankings


• Page content matters for ranking


• Anchor text still matters for keyword targeting


• Keywords matter and keyword density is important


• Link authority matters. The more links from high PR sites ir ‘topical’ sites, the better


• Generating ‘buzz’ from social media sites and press releases matters


• Timeliness matters. The more link density you can create in a short time, the better


• The domain name itself is important. If you own the domain name to a search term you are going to rank well, regardless of content

This is all very interesting and gives the lie to Google's statements of last year (though I'm certain that Google's developers are already busy plugging the apparent gaps in their algorithms).

Yet, the techniques described above do work (at least for the present) and I've just added a new section to my Maximize your Website Traffic ebook to show how this Google bomb attack relates to the wealth of techniques described in the ebook.

I'm sure there will be more fallout from the two events described above over the following weeks. For the moment, however, it's just interesting to sit back and consider the implications.