SEO Tip: Reaseach Before You Write A Newsletter Article

February 12th, 2007 Ryan Jones

Bill Platt recently wrote an article for SiteProNews talking about the GoogleBomb algorithm update. Being a sitepronews subscriber, I got this little gem in my email.

It looks like sitepronews is letting just anybody with a theory go ahead and write articles now. This one seems to throw out some off the wall theories. Let’s take a look.

First, he quotes Matt Cutts on the googlebomb change.

according to Matt Cutts of Google, the changes in the GB update
were all completed within the Google algorithm. Cutts has always
said that Google does not like to manually rearrange the search
engine results, so an algorithmic solution to the GoogleBomb was
in order. A few of the Google engineers worked together to find
a solution to the GoogleBomb issue

Then he talks about his own research.

Here’s what he claims:

What I have been able to take from the results shown above is
that Google may have targeted only “negative links”. If you want
to review what is shown above, all of the Google Bombs that are
now gone had negative connotations to them. All of the Google
Bombs that survived can be construed as having positive, or at
least non-negative, connotations to them.

Is anybody else shaking their head when reading this? Negative vs positive links? You’ve got to be kidding me.

If he really did his research, he’d have found Matt Cutts comments here that say:

I think this algorithm does successfully minimize the impact of Googlebombs as we define them here at Google. Many of the sites that probably wouldn’t want to rank for these Googlebombs no longer do.

as well as the comment on Google Blogoscoped that really hammers the point home.

Matt says:

The litmus test for a Googlebomb is whether the site in question wants to show up at #1 or whether other people are pushing it up. If a site *wants* to show up, that’s SEO rather than a Googlebomb.

So from the examples you give, [Waffles] would be a Googlebomb, but [french military victories] would not.

So, from the Google Guy himself… the new change seems to focus on whether or not the page actually contains the text that it’s being linked to with. It has absolutely nothing to do with positive and negative links.

Nice try Bill, and congrats on getting your article out there in the newsletter – but next time, please do a little bit of fact checking first. There’s no telling how many SEOs out there digest these newsletters and believe them as gospel truth.

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