* Google bombing – Google bombing is very similar to spamdexing, which modifies html pages to push them higher in search engine results for specific keywords. Examples of Google bombs include the search term “more evil than Satan himself” linking to Microsoft’s homepage as the top result and the search term “miserable failure” linking to the official George W. Bush biography as the number one result.
* Google Bowling – Rather than attempt raise a company’s ranking through nefarious practices, Google bowling uses black hat SEO techniques to drop the ranking of another company’s listing. The practice centers on the launch of a negative linking campaign where links are bought for the targeted company. These inbound links can originate from any number of sites with poor reputations including “malicious software sites, porn sites, hate sites, and negative blogs and forums”. The targeted company’s inbound links, from what Google defines as bad neighborhoods, ultimately tarnish the site and hurt its rankings on the search engine results pages. Companies using the Google bowling technique have even gone as far as reporting the targeted company to the search engines for their low quality links. Seeing that this practice was hurting innocent companies, Google made changes in its algorithms to combat this type of SEO campaign.
Another form of Google bombing takes place when links are put in numerous sites on the web by a number of people so it leads a particular keyphrase to a targeted site. This can lead to the site being overrun with hits which can crash the site. These are usually done more for wreaking havoc than for competitive purposes.
As mentioned, there is always a better mousetrap being built out there. That being said, having an occasional audit on your site can protect it from some of the practices described here. For more information, visit: SEO Company or call (800) 381-9358.