Comments on: Google Says Stephen Colbert Is No Longer The Greatest Living American

By: Acharya S

Acharya S — Tue, 29 May 2007 07:34:55 +0000

Sometimes Google is just no fun at all! I personally enjoy Google bombs – what will we do without them?

By: Nick Wilsdon

Nick Wilsdon — Fri, 11 May 2007 16:38:06 +0000

>if($query == “greatest living american”){ “colbertnation.com” = false;}

That’s brilliant Michael – can we get that on a t-shirt somewhere? ;)

By: Danny Sullivan

Danny Sullivan — Fri, 11 May 2007 07:48:20 +0000

Brandon, the article wasn’t carefully written to avoid mentioning you. You weren’t mentioned because, well, you’re not Stephen Colbert. Sorry to break this news to you :)

It’s not hard to believe you are ranking tops. I believe you are the only other person who has tried to overtly rank tops for that term, by asking people to link to you that way. Rand did NOT ask for links to his sites. He asked for links to the Colbert site. And as you, as well as my article, note — Colbert would be in the tops if those words were on the ColbertNation.com’s home page.

As for paltry 85 links, Yahoo reports that at 174. Google probably has this many if not more if you log into the Google Webmaster Central system rather than use the public reporting tool.

Still, that’s far less than the 56,000 links Yahoo reports to the ColbertNation home page. However, it’s not just the number of links — it’s the anchor text of those links (a href=”http://searchengineland.com/070315-221747.php”>Google Now Reporting Anchor Text Phrases explains more about this).

You and Joe (he’s got 25 links) are working some good anchor text, but it also suggests that if some other people using the words “greatest living american” on their pages were to gain more links, you’d start to drop.

Maybe not, of course. Being the first to really play hard to go after this game, you’ve become uniquely relevant for the term. You might hang in there.

By: Brandon Wirtz is the Greatest Living American

Brandon Wirtz is the Greatest Living American — Thu, 10 May 2007 07:11:56 +0000

No Mention of me? I was number 2 prior to the change and Am now Number one. Colbernation had no mention of the words Greatest Living American when they took the number one spot, so many people thought Google was playing along the other way. Is it that hard to believe that with my Paltry 85 links that I acheived more than Rand Fishkin, and Joe Griffin with their several thousand? Colbert has something like 500k at last check. It Screams Google Bomb. I was the only person trying who actually optimized my page an strategically chose links.

This article was carefully written to not Mention who was in first. Likely to keep me from gaining a legitimate link.

I still have tricks up my sleeve.
-Brandon Wirtz

By: Jonah Stein

Jonah Stein — Thu, 10 May 2007 03:45:26 +0000

Matt:

Thanks for confirming that the bomb was defused by a process that doesn’t run all the time.

While the answers from Adam and Vanessa say something slightly different (algorithm tweak isn’t the same as a fresh push of data) we can all understand this being a chron job.

At least the story has a happy ending.

Jonah

By: Matt Cutts

Matt Cutts — Thu, 10 May 2007 02:31:43 +0000

Here’s what I said over at digg: “it’s not a manual change; it’s just a fresh push of our Googlebomb data. The algorithm doesn’t run every day.”

Not that you need me to stop by, since Adam and Vanessa have already weighed in. :)

By: graywolf

graywolf — Thu, 10 May 2007 01:34:08 +0000

he also ranks for [Living greatest american] and [greatest american living]. I hope by algorithmic they don't mean if($query == "greatest living american"){ "colbertnation.com" = false;}

By: Danny Sullivan

Danny Sullivan — Thu, 10 May 2007 00:14:12 +0000

Actually, Michael, plenty of news and other sites get into the main index quickly. That's part of Google's fresh crawling. For example, here: That page was posted at noon Eastern time. I'm looking now around 8pm Eastern, and I see it in a search here. Here's a search where you can see a story written just before 5pm Eastern is showing up 3 hours later. We are included in Google News, so that's the main reason you'd see us showing up. We got in about a month after we launched, after I filled out a little form on the Google News site, explaining why I thought we'd be a good fit for inclusion. Guess Google agreed. Filled out the same form for Yahoo, by the way. Yahoo News still doesn't include us. We continue to hope.

By: Michael Martinez

Michael Martinez — Wed, 09 May 2007 22:45:25 +0000

Don’t complain too loudly, Danny. SearchEngineLand pages get into the Main Web Index in less than 5 hours, whereas CNN and other major news media sites have to wait at least a day.

Conspiracy theorists might conclude that someone at Google may be giving you a little Web search love.

By: randfish

randfish — Wed, 09 May 2007 21:31:59 +0000

This feels so artificial, it’s surprising. I would have thought Google wouldn’t engage in this kind of thing… I’m having trouble deducing the intent of the move.