Santorum: The Definition Page

The page at SpreadingSantorum.com, created by columnist Dan Savage as a protest against Santorum’s views about homosexuality, has maintained its position in the top results on Google for years. The page defines “santorum” as:

The frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the by-product of anal sex.

To understand more of the history of the site, and how it ended up doing so well on Google (and Bing, Yahoo and Baidu), see my previous article, Should Rick Santorum’s “Google Problem” Be Fixed?

The page was still in the top results for a search on “santorum” when I checked last week. However, Anthony Hecht alerted me this evening that the page had disappeared. Indeed, I see the same, though as I said, the related blog is now showing. I’ve had multiple other confirmations this has happened.

Before The Change

The before-and-after explains better. This is before, as of Feb. 8, the last screenshot I have handy for a search on santorum on Google:

You can see that SpreadingSantorum.com appears as the first regular listing; the official Rick Santorum site comes in at  fourth. Those positions are pretty typical of what I’ve seen over the past few weeks, as I’ve written about this story.

After The Change

Here’s tonight:

In this case, the official Rick Santorum site has remained in fourth position. The SpreadingSantorum.com page has gone. It doesn’t appear in the first page of results at all. However, the Spreading Santorum blog — blog.spreadingsantorum.com — does appear in the top results, listed sixth.

The first place position Spreading Santorum had is taken over by a page at Urban Dictionary, which says:

The sometimes frothy, usually slimy, amalgam of lubricant, stray fecal matter, and ejaculate that leaks out of the receiving partner’s anus after a…

That’s a pretty odd switch. Given that Spreading Santorum originated the sex-related definition of “santorum,” its pretty odd relevancy for Google to decide that a different site offering an even more explicit definition should get top billing.

For a search on rick santorum, SpreadingSantorum.com had ranked in the first page of results, such as in fourth place, as shown here. Today, it’s moved to the second page of results. And oddly, it’s not the home page that appears but instead one of its inside pages:

Anti-Santorum, Just Less Explicit

Here’s another before-and-after, this time focusing on the how the Spreading Santorum page used to appear, complete with explicit description, and how the blog’s home page now takes its place:

What Happened?

I’d say Google’s come under greater pressure about the “santorum” definition page as Rick Santorum has advanced as a candidate. There have been any number of mainstream press reports about it, including some debate on whether Google should do anything to “fix” it.

To date, Google has refused to make any change specifically to the listing, which is pretty much in keeping with how it approaches these types of issues.

Instead, Google prefers to resolve tricky issues like these by looking for solutions that may impact a wide range listings. For example, rather than specifically fixing how President George W. Bush was “Google bombed” to rank for “miserable failure,” Google rolled out a fix to solve Google bombs in general.

“Official Page” Change?

As I’ve explained before, the situation with Santorum is not technically a Google bomb, which is why it has escaped that pre-existing fix. But the shift might have happened due to an announcement Google made yesterday, that among about 40 changes to its search engine, it rolled-out an improvement for detecting “official” pages:

We’ve made an adjustment to how we detect official pages to make more accurate identifications. The result is that many pages that were previously misidentified as official will no longer be.

Possibly, the change is seeing blog.spreadingsantorum.com as the “official” page for Spreading Santorum rather than SpreadingSantorum.com itself.

Alternatively, it could be that SpreadingSantorum.com was somehow getting an “official” designation of some type associated with it, which may in turn have lead to a a ranking boost. Without that, the page dropped, with the blog moving up.

Link Change? Panda “Thin” Content To Blame?

Two other changes might also be involved. One is this:

We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years. We often rearchitect or turn off parts of our scoring in order to keep our system maintainable, clean and understandable.

Google wouldn’t tell us more about what happened here (we did ask yesterday), but it could be that the links pointing at the Santorum definition page are being evaluated (like all links are) in a new way that prevent it from ranking as well.

Alternatively, there’s this:

This launch refreshes data in the Panda system, making it more accurate and more sensitive to recent changes on the web.

The Panda Update is designed to prevent “thin” content from ranking well (see our Panda Update infographic for more about this). A single page with only a short definition might have been deemed to thin and got hit by this latest Panda update, which rolled out yesterday.

Of course, the Spreading Romney site is just as “thin” as Spreading Santorum, and that hasn’t disappeared. So Panda might not be to blame.

Other Weirdness?

For the search geeks out there trying to diagnose this, consider this:

That’s what I get at the top of the results for a search on spreading santorum. The first arrow shows how blog.spreadingsantorum.com is listed, then “sitelinks” are shown below that. The second arrow is pointing at the home page of spreadingsantorum.com, which technically is a separate site from blog.spreadingsantorum.com.

This sometimes happens. For example, a search on amazon sometimes shows me Amazon’s affiliate site as a sitelink for Amazon.com, even though the affiliate site its own domain.

But look at the third arrow. Even though blog.spreadingsantorum.com is listed as the main link, the “More results” link wants to bring back matches for spreadingsantorum.com overall. It’s strange and suggests there’s some confusion going on.

By the way, I heard back from Savage soon after posting this story. He’s made no changes to the site that he’s aware of that would have caused this, he told me.

Stay Tuned

I’m checking with Google for any explanation they have. Stay tuned for more. Meanwhile, the definition continues to rank tops in searches for “santorum” on Bing, Yahoo and even Baidu.

NOTE: The original headline for this story of “Santorum: No Longer A By-Product Of Anal Sex, According To Google” was changed because, as now noted, the Urban Dictionary listing is still keeping that definition up there.

Google Responds: It’s SafeSearch To Blame

Postscript (10:30 AM ET): Google has sent this statement:

We make more than 500 changes to our algorithms in a typical year, and with each of those changes sites will shuffle to different positions in our search results. We have not manually taken action to change the ranking of the site.

Postscript 2 (12:45 PM ET): Google tells me this is related to its improved SafeSearch algorithm, one of the other changes that was just announced. There’s no explanation yet about about why Spreading Santorum got hit while the Urban Dictionary page did not.

Postscript 3 (7:00 PM PT): Google says that the change even impacts results if you have SafeSearch set to off. In other words, even if you turn SafeSearch off — and should get no adult content filtered out — adult content may still be filtered out. That’s pretty weird.

The best I can think is that if you go back to what Google posted about the SafeSearch change:

We have updated how we deal with adult content, making it more accurate and robust. Now, irrelevant adult content is less likely to show up for many queries.

I’ve bolded the key part. SafeSearch was originally designed to keep porn content from showing up unexpectedly, such as when kids might search for “barbie” and get naked women showing up. Enable SafeSearch, and you helped prevent that.

But SafeSearch now seems to operate to ensure that porn, adult-oriented or possibly objectionable content doesn’t appear for a query that doesn’t seem to be relevant for that type of material.

Search for “sex,” and you might expect some explicit content. Don’t want it, SafeSearch can help prevent it. Search for “santorum,” and many people might not expect explicit content. As a result, SafeSearch effectively downgrades adult-oriented content even if you don’t have it switched on, because it deems that content to be less relevant to the search.

In the case of Spreading Santorum, the associated blog is far more than just an explicit definition of “santorum” as related to anal sex. As a result, the blog might not be tagged as adult while the now-missing home page was. When it went, the blog still had enough relevancy to effectively take its place.

That’s my speculation. Again, I’ll see if I can get further confirmation from Google. I’m also still trying to get an explanation about why the explicit definition from Urban Dictionary didn’t get tagged.

Postscript 4 (March 5): Google confirmed for me that SafeSearch does downgrade adult content if not deemed relevant to the search. Also, since March 2, the Urban Dictionary site has no longer been appearing.

Postscript 5 (March 8): Santorum’s own site now ranks tops, Spreading Santorum is back (sort of) and other notable changes are covered in our follow-up: Santorum’s Changing “Google Problem” — & Search Engine Land — Make The Rachel Maddow Show.

See also our new category for further updates that may come: Santorum’s Google Problem.

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• Now, Mitt Romney Has A Santorum-Like Bing & Google Problem
• Bing & Google: “Spreading Romney” Ranking Tops For “Romney” Is Normal

Spreading Romney’s Remarkable Rise

My earlier story, Now, Mitt Romney Has A Santorum-Like Bing & Google Problem, explains how the Spreading Romney site created by Jack Shepler skyrocketed to the first page of Google’s listings within days after being launched. It remains that way on Google today, as well as Bing.

It’s a remarkable gain given that it beat out news stories and existing sites like the pro-Romney “Committed To Romney” site and the anti-Romney “Dogs Against Romney” site that are both years-old.

The Search Engines Speak

Bing told me about the gain:

Bing uses multiple signals and approaches in ranking search results. We don’t have anything else to add.

Google told me:

This site has been live for about a month and has attracted a fair amount of attention both on TV and online, and Google’s algorithmic rankings are reflecting that fact.

Those statements shed little light on the situation.

Search engines use many factors to rank web pages. To understand more background about this, see our key resources below:

• The Periodic Table Of SEO Ranking Factors
• What Is Search Engine Optimization? The Three Minute SEO Video!

With that background in mind, I’ll explore some of the factors that might be at play here.

The Freshness Factor

How people link to a web page is one of the primary ways that both Google and Bing determine how and what it should rank for. As I previously covered, the single-page site does have some links, but not so many as to expect it to do so well, so quickly.

One explanation is that it might be benefiting from something Google calls “Query Deserved Freshness,” which is when new content is given a boost for searches that seem to be especially geared toward needing fresh material.

Searches for “romney” certainly qualify, here. People conducting them are likely looking for new material, in particular news content. As a new page, Spreading Romney might be getting a QDF boost that may wear-off in the near future, as the site is deemed older.

Older doesn’t mean you can’t rank. Indeed, the Spreading Santorum site that inspired Spreading Romney maintains its first page position for “santorum” because of its age, the amount of earned links and authority it has gained over time, in my view.

In the end, perhaps freshness is an issue here. I’d largely discounted that because Spreading Romney isn’t a news site. But just being new, even if not necessarily a news site, might be enough for both Google and Bing, an interesting observation.

The Social Factor

I’ve seen a number of people question if social activity has caused the page to do well. Perhaps, though the challenge with this is that Google and Bing see completely different social signals.

Google has been adamant that Facebook data isn’t used for its rankings. The number of Facebook shares a page has carries no weight, Google has said. My understanding is the same is true for the number of Facebook Likes.

As for Twitter, while Google sees some tweets, it has suggested is has no way to properly count the tweets a page may have gained since the expiration of Twitter’s deal with Google last year.

Google does see Google+ data, of course –and the Spreading Romney site had gained about 300 +1 votes when I first wrote about it (today, the figure is up to nearly 700). Perhaps that’s what’s causing the rise with Google?

If so, what about Bing? Bing, to my knowledge, doesn’t use Google+ data. It does have deals with both Facebook and Twitter, however. The site had nearly 3,000 Facebook likes when I first wrote about it (now just over 5,000) and about 1,200 tweets (now about 1,700). Those might be factors helping on Bing.

Maybe. Maybe the completely separate sets of social data that Google and Bing both have, coupled with linking data and the freshness of this site, helped it move up so quickly. But it would be more compelling if there were a common factor.

“The Maddow Factor”

What about that “attention” that Google mentioned. It’s true. Rachel Maddow did mention this site had been created in January, as I wrote about before. Below is the video where she covers it. Note that she’s not saying that the site is ranking on Google, only that there’s an attempt for this to happen:

1. Visits: People go to the site, or search for it and click to it from search results
2. Votes: People link to or talk about the site after finding it

I’ve already covered what happens with the second item, the way people effectively vote for the site. Yes, there were links, but not an amazing number of them. Yes, there was “talk” in the form of social sharing, but there are issues about how each search engine would “add up” those votes.

Measuring The Maddow Factor & Interest Spike

That leaves the idea of visits having an influence. There are ways that both Google and Bing can detect if a site has gained an unusually large number of visits than might be expected, both by watching how people surf the web through their respective toolbars and by watching how people click to sites on their search results.

Were lots of people searching for “Spreading Romney?” Consider this:

After typing only a few letters of the word “spreading,” the suggestion of “spreading santorum” comes up on Google, suggesting this is a popular related search that people are doing. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be suggested.

At Bing, you also get the suggestion, but only if you type the full word “spreading” followed by the letter “s,” suggesting that it’s popular as a related search, but not super popular.

Now let’s consider Romney at Google:

 Yes, it comes up as a suggestion now, though you have to work for it. At Bing, it doesn’t at all:

Still, it does register to some degree on Google. How does it compare to interest in Spreading Santorum? Fairly well, initially after the Maddow mention:

That chart is from Google Insights For Search. It shows the relative number of people searching for the words “spreading santorum” (the blue line) versus “spreading romney” (the red line). You can see the red line spike right around the time the site appears to have been mentioned by Maddow, approaching about half the interest in “spreading santorum.”

The Ranking Trifecta

My guess is that Spreading Romney hit on a perfect storm of things in its favor to rank well:

• It was new
• It picked up a few links to add some relevancy
• It gained an immediate interest spike associated with “romney” searches

Had the Maddow mention not happened, I’m not sure it would have gained these rankings. The interest spike may have been the extra factor it really needed.

By now, a Spreading Gingrich site has sprung up that’s getting some attention. But will it get the trifecta that appears needed to gain top rankings on Bing and Google? Or is there no trifecta, and will spreading-style sites instead spread out to search results near you?

Stay tuned.

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Postscript: There have been many updates to this story. See our Santorum’s Google Problem category for the latest articles.

Spreading Romney

I was pretty surprised to discover the “Spreading Romney” site appearing in the top results on Google and Bing in a search for “romney” that I did today. I don’t recall seeing it recently, so it appears to be a new gain.

Here it is on Google, as the ninth regular listing:

I’ve also seen it as high as fourth position, also in sixth and sometimes Romney’s official site doesn’t even appear. Ninth seems to be the most consistent position for it.

The searches I’ve done were logged out of Google, using the “incognito” mode in Google Chrome, so that I appeared as a fresh searcher that Google had no history for. I also tested this on two separate computers.

Here it is on Bing, in the eight regular position:

The site is a single page which offers an alternative definition for “romney,” as shown below:

“To defecate in terror,” reads the definition, with the word “terror” as a link to a Huffington Post summary of news about Romney’s putting his dog in a rooftop carrier for a 12-hour drive to Canada in 1983 that’s been making the rounds again to haunt him.

The dog, as the journalist at the Boston Globe who originally found the story in 2007 explains, apparently didn’t enjoy the ride and ended up having diarrhea that trickled down the car while Romney was driving.

Unlike the Spreading Santorum site, Spreading Romney doesn’t lead to an associated blog with lots of information about Romney. Rather, there’s a link saying “Indianapolis Web Design,” which leads to a design firm that that may have produced the page and is hoping for attention. I’m checking on this. The page also links to Spreading Santorum.

Amazing Rise With So Few Links

It’s pretty impressive rise to the top of Google and Bing, for a site that appears to have started around January 12. Less than a month, and it’s in the top results for Google and Bing. How did that happen?

One way to know would be to see the people linking to the site. Here’s what Google reports:

Wow. Not one person seems to link to this site, and yet it makes it so high in Google. It’s pretty much the same at Bing:

Only two links gets you to the top of Bing, it appears.

In reality, neither search engine is reporting what’s really going on. If you want to understand more about why they deliberately withhold this type of linking data, and why that’s bad for those trying to investigate these types of situations, see my post from earlier this year: 2011: The Year Google & Bing Took Away From SEOs & Publishers.

Maybe a third-party tool can help. I turned to the Open Site Explorer, which shows links to sites based on its own data from “crawling” the web. It turns out, this site seems to be so new that OSE has no information. Majestic Site Explorer did better, telling me the site had 219 links to it from 67 unique websites:

Majestic sent me a full report of all the sites it found linking to Spreading Romney. It seems to be a relative handful of small sites of various types.

The Linking Campaign

Here’s one of those links:

That’s on this page at Democratic Underground, where the discussion is opened by someone saying “Google Bomb away” with a link to Spreading Romney and the word “Romney” as part of the link. The discussion goes on to encourage others to link in exactly this way. The page has nine links like this, in all.

Fark has a similar link, though it’s not really instructions on “bombing” in the way that happens at Democratic Underground. Some Tumblr pages link. A link on Digg. One from the “True Blue Liberal” blog.

Spreading Romney Gets Rachel Maddow Attention

Exploring further, the site certainly seemed to get a boost when Rachel Maddow mentioned it on her show shortly after the site appears to have been created, on January 12:

It’s Not A Google Bomb, But….

As I said, it’s pretty amazing that this site has shot up in the rankings so quickly. It’s outranking long-standing sites such as:

• The American Romney Breeders Association (Romney is a type of sheep)
• The Committed To Romney site (which seems to be a pro-Romney site with substantial content stretching back to 2005)
• The Dogs Against Romney site (apparently dating back to 2007, with 25,000 associated Facebook fans)

For this site to leap-frog over those and others, it creates all the same issues that Google initially encountered with real Google bombs, the impression that anyone can fire off a linking campaign and make it into the top results for anything.

Google eventually fixed the Google Bomb problem in 2007. The people who assume that Spreading Santorum is ranking because of a Google bomb — or that Spreading Romney is also a Google bomb — don’t technically understand what a Google Bomb is. Maddow is one of these people, by the way.

A Google bomb involves linking to a page with certain words to try and make it rank for those words, even if the page itself doesn’t mention the words. When people wanted to Google bomb President George W. Bush’s biography into the top results for a search on “miserable failure,” they linked to his bio with those words. That made it relevant for them, and it ranked.

The Google bomb “fix” effectively said that if a page doesn’t contain the words that people are trying to bomb  for, then the page won’t rank for those words. That’s why, after the fix, Bush briefly ranked again for “failure” after the White House used that word on his page.

Neither the anti-Santorum nor the anti-Romney pages are Google bombs because they use the words “santorum” and “romney” on them.

Google Bombs Redefined

Still, the pages are viewed by some as Google bombs in the non-technical sense of appearing to be some type of practical joke that has been played, some out-of-line manipulation of Google’s search results, something that perhaps makes those results irrelevant. And the Romney site ranking so well, so quickly, certainly suggests this is the case.

There’s a strong argument that the Spreading Santorum site has earned its place in the results for a search on “santorum” because it’s a protest site that began way back June 2003. That site has been out there longer than Rick Santorum has maintained his own official site. When Santorum left the US Senate, he doesn’t appear to have maintained his own web site. His campaign site is relatively recently, to my knowledge, as are his social media profiles. He joined Twitter in July 2009.

Substance Vs. Pranks

The Spreading Santorum site also has an associated blog that’s regularly updated with criticisms about Santorum based on news stories and recent events. There’s substance to it, rather than it just being a joke, as some perceive.

The Romney site touches on a serious issue, the treatment of animals, but there’s nothing further behind it. It has no historic legacy. It feels more like a successful joke on Romney than some type of political opposition.

The latter will rub off on the former, I’d say. Both will be seen as equal, and both will be seen as if Google is just letting anyone — in particular liberals — do what they want with its search results.

Certainly Google should take a harder look at why its algorithm rewarded a site with so little substance to it, especially as Google’s “Panda Update” is especially supposed to penalize “thin” sites. Spreading Romney is arguably a “thin” site that’s getting past that filter (perhaps because it’s so new that it hasn’t yet been caught by it). The Spreading Santorum site might need to consolidate its blog into the main spreadingsantorum.com domain to avoid “thin” problems, too.

It’s Also A Bing Bing

Of course, everything about the perception that people can just “bomb” Google results to make political statements is equally applicable to Bing. But it’s rare to see anyone criticize Bing over this.

By the way, for those wondering, there isn’t yet any type of similar protest sites that seems to have made it into the first two pages of results on either Google or Bing for searches on Paul, Gingrich or Obama.

More From The Site Creator

Postscript: I’ve heard back from Jack Shepler, who created the site, who told me:

I’m not associated with any campaigns. I made it to be funny, and to make a point, and I believe it did just that.

and:

I can tell you that so far the site has received 44,492 pageviews, according to analytics. I don’t have plans at this time to expand on the site, but who knows what will happen if he gets the Republican nomination.

and:

The site launched January 10. A friend said it was on page 2 on January 14. It hit page 1 on January 16. Within a couple days it was up the 4th result, where it stayed for a while. I double checked the page 1 results with a couple friends on the internet to be sure.

Postscript: See Bing & Google: “Spreading Romney” Ranking Tops For “Romney” Is Normal for my follow-up story with a lengthy analysis of how freshness, some link gains an attention due to the “Maddow Factor” might be at work.

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Postscript: There have been many updates to this story. See our Santorum’s Google Problem category for the latest articles.

Wait, you didn’t realize Rick Santorum has a “Bing problem” that’s exactly the same as his well-documented “Google problem,” where a search for “santorum” lists a web page defining that word as the by-product of anal sex above Santorum’s official web site?

He does. In fact, Santorum’s had his Bing problem for months, if not years. It’s just that everyone fixates on Google. Even Santorum does when he gets asked about it, such as telling Politico last year:

“I suspect if something was up there like that about Joe Biden, they’d get rid of it,” Santorum said. “If you’re a responsible business, you don’t let things like that happen in your business that have an impact on the country.”

He continued: “To have a business allow that type of filth to be purveyed through their website or through their system is something that they say they can’t handle but I suspect that’s not true.”

It’s A Search Engine Problem, Not A Google Problem

In the wake of Santorum’s win, and no doubt eventual questions in some quarters about why Google still isn’t “fixing” things for him, I thought it was worthwhile to flip things around and discuss his Bing issue.

It’s worth stressing that this isn’t just some gay-loving-Google-liberal-leaning-hates-Santorum thing and more a general problem Santorum has with the major search engines. In particular, it’s a problem that’s ultimately down to Santorum’s anti-gay views.

Santorum & Bing: Just Like Google

Here’s what Bing currently shows for santorum:

You can see that just after the special news area that Bing inserts above the regular results, the first listing that the arrow points to is for SpreadingSantorum.com, with a description that reads:

Santorum 1. The frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex. 2. Senator Rick Santorum

Santorum’s own official site, RickSantorum.com, appears third on the list.

Over at Google, which gets all the attention, the same issue happens:

Google’s news box appears further down on the page, probably because of the special election results box that appears at the top. Spreading Santorum, the anti-Santorum web site, appears as the first regular result. The official Rick Santorum web site appears fourth in the regular listings, one further down than with Bing.

By the way, the same thing also happens at Yahoo. Since Yahoo largely depends on Bing’s results, a search on “santorum” brings up the anti-Santorum site first, as it does with Bing — though after Yahoo’s own news units.

The news is better for searches for Rick Santorum’s full name, rather than just the word “santorum.” In that case, his official site ranks tops. Here’s Bing:

And here’s Google:

Does It Matter?

It’s becoming clear that Santorum’s Bing problem, as with his Google problem, isn’t stopping many Republican voters from selecting him over other candidates. So should Google or Bing really worry about trying to somehow fix it, especially when any type of change like that opens them up to accusations about censorship or political favoritism?

Perhaps.

The SafeSearch Solution

The biggest issue to me might be the fact that as interest in Santorum grows, you’ve got more children in schools likely to be searching on his name. Getting a fairly explicit description in their search results talking about “lube and fecal matter” and “anal sex” might not be what a lot of parents want them seeing.

Both Bing and Google have a SafeSearch filter that is set to “Moderate” by default, which means it only filters out explicit images. Setting this to “Strict” will keep the Spreading Santorum site from appearing in text listings. That’s something parents and teachers can use.

It’s Not An Irrelevant “Google Bomb”

How about a manual intervention to solve this problem, which has mistakenly been called a “Google Bomb.” Didn’t Google do something like that for President George W. Bush?

“Liberal leaning” Google did. The Google Bomb fix wasn’t specifically designed just for Bush, who found people were linking to his biography in a way to make it rank tops for “miserable failure.” It was meant to fix any type of case where people tried to make pages rank for odd phrases that they weren’t relevant for. But questions about the prominent Bush listing helped prompt the fix.

The Spreading Santorum site isn’t ranking because of some type of Google Bomb campaign. It ranks because it is entirely relevant for “santorum.” It was created years ago as a protest against Rick Santorum’s anti-homosexual views. Those views are entirely relevant, in fact arguably more relevant the further Santorum advances as a candidate to be president of the United States.

To drop the site, Bing and Google would actually be making the type of political move that Santorum seems to think that Google is already doing (he clearly doesn’t seem to think about or care about Bing).

But How About A Disclaimer?

There is something that Google is long overdue to implement. Consider what it used to show when you’d search for “miserable failure” and got the George W. Bush biography:

See the ad above the listings that the arrow points to, which say:

Why these results? These results may seem politically slanted. Here’s what happened

The ad led to an explanation at the official Google Blog. Google does a similar thing today, for a search on jew, which brings up an anti-Jewish web site:

It’s long past time for Google to do something similar for searches on “santorum.” They are going to confuse some people, who will assume Google’s trying to advance a political agenda with its search results.

I’d say Bing should do the same thing, but Bing’s never even tried to have explanations like this. Maybe it should consider it.

But Spreading Santorum Is Here To Stay

As for Rick Santorum, as I wrote before, the best way to solve his Google and Bing problems would be to change his views on homosexuality or make a donation to a gay marriage-rights group. That’s what Dan Savage, who created the Spreading Santorum site, told Mother Jones in 2010:

Savage has not forgiven Santorum for his seven-year-old comments: “Rick would have prevented me and my partner from being able to adopt my son,” he points out. But Savage does have a deal for the politician. “If Rick Santorum wants to make a $5 million donation to [the gay marriage group] Freedom to Marry, I will take it down. Interest starts accruing now.”

That’s unlikely to happen, so Santorum will have to continue living with the Spreading Santorum site showing up alongside his own.

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• How Rick Santorum Is Making His “Google Problem” Worse
• Dear Google: Crappy Results Like This Don’t Give The Impression You Care About Search
• Google Kills Bush’s Miserable Failure Search & Other Google Bombs
• Google Says Stephen Colbert Is No Longer The Greatest Living American
• After Santorum’s Win, The Daily Show & Colbert Report Laugh Again At His Google Problem

Postscript: There have been many updates to this story. See our Santorum’s Google Problem category for the latest articles.

As spotted by Search Engine Roundtable, people were asking in Google’s help forums why various searches related to defining English people returned the Wikipedia page about the C-word, as shown below:

The screenshot shows Google listing the Wikipedia page first in a search for define english person. It also lists that page first or in the first page of results for related searches such as:

• define an english person
• what defines an english person
• define english

For the record, Google tells us:

We’re aware of the results for this query, and we don’t like them. As always, we look for algorithmic improvements that will address thousands of searches, rather than manual fixes for just one.

A Google Bomb?

I’ve seen some reports wondering if the listing is being caused by a Google Bomb, but I don’t think that’s the case.

A Google Bomb is where there’s a concerted effort to link to a page with certain words contained within the links themselves, in an effort to make a page rank for those words, even if the page isn’t explicitly about that topic.

For example, when some people were upset with President George W. Bush a few years ago, there was a campaign to get people to link to his official biography with the words “miserable failure” in those links. As a result, the page start ranking for that.

Google later instituted a fix for Google Bombs like this. In particular, since the George W. Bush biography wasn’t explicitly about “miserable failure” nor used those words on the page, it was prevented from ranking for that term. Our stories below explain more about how Google Bombs work as well as the fix:

• Google Kills Bush’s Miserable Failure Search & Other Google Bombs
• Google Says Stephen Colbert Is No Longer The Greatest Living American

Much attention has been focused lately on how a search for “santorum” brings up an anti-Rick Santorum web site. Some have mistaken this as being due to a Google Bomb. It’s not, because while presidential hopeful Rick Santorum might not agree, the page at issue in that search is indeed explicitly about an alternative definition for “santorum” and does use that word.

No, Not A Google Bomb

So how about this Wikipedia page? If it were a Google Bomb, you’d expect to find some origin, to call-to-action somewhere on the web telling people to link to the page with certain words to produce this type of result within Google. After some hunting, I can’t find anything like this.

For example, here’s how the Open Site Explorer tool reports people linking to the page. The most popular text used in the links are for the C-word or involving that. None of the links show things like “english person” in them.

In addition, Google Bombs usually go off on Bing, as well. Do these same search on Bing, and the Wikipedia page doesn’t appear.

All this suggests a problem with Google’s own ranking systems, not due to some type of external internet graffiti attempt. Google told me they are looking into what happened and how to fix this. But with the upcoming holidays, don’t expect an answer or solution probably until the New Year.

Of course, by then, Google may face a new challenge. Thanks to its glitch, that Wikipedia page has now become relevant for searches on that topic. The odd Google search result were even added to the page, though currently, these have been edited off.

(Stock image via Shutterstock Used with permission.)

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• How Google Instant’s Autocomplete Suggestions Work
• Google Says Stephen Colbert Is No Longer The Greatest Living American
• Google Kills Bush’s Miserable Failure Search & Other Google Bombs
• Google Removes Offensive Obama Image; Was It Justified?
• Offensive Michelle Obama Image Returns, Google Buys Ad To Explain
• Disturbing Michelle Obama Image Makes A Case For Facial Recognition In Google’s New Image Search
• Should Rick Santorum’s “Google Problem” Be Fixed?
• Santorum & Google’s Search Quality Czar Matt Cutts Makes The Colbert Report

I’ve not heard of any active campaign to linkbomb Obama to the top for these words, so I’m guessing this is fallout from the long-standing “miserable failure” googlebomb that was impacting his predecessor, President George W. Bush.

Below, some key background from our archives:

Google Kills Bush’s Miserable Failure Search & Other Google Bombs from January 2007 provides detailed background on what googlebombing or linkbombing is. In short, it’s a campaign to linking to a particular page with certain words, in hopes of making the page rank for those words. That article also explains how Bush’s biography was bombed into the top results for “failure” and “miserable failure,” until Google put in a solution designed to disable all types of linkbombs (they weren’t trying to help Bush specifically).

Google Says Stephen Colbert Is No Longer The Greatest Living American from May 2007 explains how Google’s solution had a flaw. Rather than running automatically, it required that Google periodically run a linkbomb defusing algorithm. Or so Google said. Some simply felt that the “algorithm” was nothing more than Google making manual edits to remove new bombs, when detected.

Bush – Tops For “Who Is A Failure” On Google from February 2008 shows that Bush was ranking again for a “failure” related query, “who is a failure.” It turns out that this wasn’t a new thing. It was a consequence of earlier “miserable failure” linkbomb that hadn’t been detected, apparently — where changing the order of the words or adding a few more could trigger the bomb to blow up again.

Obama Is “Failure” At Google & “Miserable Failure” At Yahoo from January 2009 shows how Obama inherited the “failure” and “miserable failure” googlebombs from Bush, in part because Obama’s web team redirected visitors looking for Bush’s biography to Obama’s.

That was fixed, and the rankings went away. I’m not sure how long the “who is failure” search has been ranking Obama on Google. It’s puzzling, because his page is isolated from those past Bush links now. A quick rundown on rankings for key terms across the search engines makes things more puzzling:

Google: “Failure,” “miserable failure” and “who is a failure” bring up neither Bush nor Obama in the top 50 results, but “who is failure” ranks Obama #1.

Ask: “Failure” doesn’t find Bush or Obama in the top 50 result. For “miserable failure,” Bush ranks #45. For “who is a failure,” neither ranks. For “who is failure,” Obama ranks #1, as with Google.

Bing: For “failure,” the Bush bio ranks #2 for me. It ranks #3 for “miserable failure.” It ranks #2 for “who is a failure” and “who is failure.”

Yahoo: For “failure,” Bush ranks #11. Bush ranks #5 for “miserable failure.” His bio ranks #16 for “who is a failure.” For “who is failure,” neither Bush nor Obama rank in the top 50 results.

Overall, Bush continues to show up for failure-related terms other than at Google and Ask. With Ask, I suspect this is because they’re taking some of Google’s editorial results. Ask has denied this in the past. But Ask has also prided itself on how in the past, it stood above the other search engines by not showing the same linkbombs that would often appear elsewhere.

So if Bush is the failure based on link analysis but everyone else (or at least Google’s two largest rivals), what’s up with Google? Why’s this happening? Perhaps there’s new link data out there influencing Obama’s page?

Alternatively, it might be something that Ciarán Norris pointed out the last time I wrote about this. There’s still a link that might be transmitting “failure” credit that was aimed at Bush to Obama, at least in how Google counts things.

This was the page that originally was bombed:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html

It now does a 301 permanent redirect to this page:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/about/presidents/georgewbush/

Without the technical jargon, that means if anyone “calls” that original page, they get forwarded automatically to the new location — and search engines are told to transfer anything they know about the old page to the new one.

Unfortunately, in 2006, that “gwbbio.html” was also temporarily redirected here:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/

That page now does a 301 redirect here:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/president-obama/

My assumption is that some people who wanted to googlebomb Bush used the post-2006 “/president” address, which is still causing problems today for Obama, just as I was expecting might happen:

Of course, they [the Bush White House] had to do a redirect. Too many people had bookmarked the former address of the biography. But rather than redirect to the new biography page, they choose to point at the page used by all US presidents — Bush currently, Obama next and future presidents to come.

Aside from turning Bush’s search engine problem into a legacy issue for future presidents, the change is also misleading the US public and others. The redirection from the old bio page should lead to the new bio page, not require those using old bookmarks to guess at where the new location is at.

What to do? In looking at my past writings, I realize I never addressed how to handle that “/president” page myself. I don’t think I was expect it to carry much link weight versus the original URL that has been out there so long.

The original page redirects to Bush’s bio, as it should. It might be that it does make sense to keep that “/president” page pointing at whoever is the current sitting president. And they might be forced to inherit whatever linkbombs hit their predecessor in the past.

I told you so. Or I told anyone who cared. I even tried to reach the Obama administration in four or five different ways. Do a search on Yahoo right now for miserable failure, and you’ll find President Barack Obama’s page ranking either in the top spot or the second spot. Given a redirect that Obama’s web team has put into place, he should solidify into that number one spot over time. Eventually, Microsoft’s Live Search should reflect that, as well. And over at Google, Obama will likely gain a top page listing for a search on failure.

I know. There are bigger issues Obama has to deal with. But then again, this is supposed to be the tech-savvy presidency. It should be search engine optimization savvy, as well.

What happened? If you want the long version, see my Bush: Fix Your “Miserable Failure” Googlebomb Legacy Before Obama Takes Office article from earlier this month. It documents how people “Googlebombed” George W. Bush’s biography to rank tops for searches on “miserable failure” at Google and other search engines.

Bush’s web team tried to kill that bomb by redirecting any request for Bush’s biography to a page for all US presidents. I had a slight hope that when the new White House site went up, the bomb might permanently be defused because of how the site was failing to redirect requests for many pages properly (for more on the new White House site’s issues with redirection, see my follow-up article, Despite Inauguration, Google & Others Still Think It’s President Bush, Not President Obama plus Vanessa Fox’s article Making Site Architecture Search-Friendly: Lessons From whitehouse.gov).

Well, they’re redirecting now. Any request for Bush’s old biography that was here:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html

is now being redirected to Obama’s biography here:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/president_obama/

For the real tech nerds out there, the redirect is a 301 “permanent” one, which means the White House is explicitly telling search engines that the old Bush biography has now been permanently replaced by Barack Obama’s page.

As a result, Obama now inherits all the links containing anchor text with the words “miserable failure” in them. IE, all those links are acting as votes saying that Obama should rank well for those words.

Ugh. Over at Google, almost exactly two years ago, they put in a fix to solve the Googlebombing issue. That dropped Bush out of the top results for those two words (and thus is still keeping Obama out), but then he came back up for the single word failure. That seemed down to Bush’s brief use of the word “failure” on the page (George W. Bush: A Failure Once Again, According To Google explains this more), and once the word was no longer used, it stopped ranking for it — at least until recently.

I noticed earlier this month that the Bush page was once again ranking for “failure,” even though Google’s Googlebomb fix was supposed to prevent this. I never heard back from Google after contacting them informally about why this was happening. And it’s still going on:

Notice how Google is still reporting that the page is about Bush, listed in position three. That’s because it has yet to process the redirect. Because that page redirects to Obama’s page, as with Yahoo, it’s going to inherit all the failure love.

I’m glad the White House has put redirects in place. As I pointed out, the lack of them meant many people trying to find biographies of past presidents such as George Washington were going to get errors. And it’s understandable that it would take them some time to get them in place. My assumption is that on Inauguration Day, the old site was completely removed and the new prebuilt site was installed, with the redirects being something they figured they’d quickly process in the coming days. (Plus, consider the technological “dark ages” they’re found after moving into the White House).

Still, the redirect they are doing is hurting Obama plus not helping those who are still trying to find Bush’s biography where it actually lives. So repeating myself from what I said earlier this month, here’s what should happen:

First:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html

Should be 301 redirected here:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/about/presidents/georgewbush/

That will fix the bomb. More important, that’s where Bush’s biography is actually located. There are people who linked to the old address for his biography for non-political reasons. They should be redirected to the correct location.

Next, this page:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/biography.html

was where Bush’s biography moved to when his staff tried to solve the bomb. Rather than point at Obama’s page (as it does now), it should point to this page for all US presidents:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/about/presidents/

The good news is that doing this shouldn’t cause the page for all US presidents to suffer the past Googlebomb. In addition, anyone who bookmarked Bush’s biography under this generic URL can still find it as part of a list of all US presidents.

In other news, I’d earlier covered how the White House wasn’t using the NOODP tag, which meant that Google was listing the White House home page in some cases as if Bush was still in office. The White House still hasn’t made use of that tag, but after Google noticed the issue, they fixed it on their end.

Meanwhile, Yahoo is finally reflecting the new occupant of the White House in its own listings. That leaves Microsoft as the last of the major search engines to still think Bush is in office there:

After two days, I’d have expected Microsoft to have recrawled the home page and reflect an updated listing by now. I’m pretty sure it won’t be much longer until that’s fixed.

Meanwhile, if the White House would like to learn more about redirection, I’d highly recommend attending our 301 Redirect, How Do I Love You? Let Me Count The Ways session at SMX West, Search Engine Land’s search marketing conference running from Feb. 10-12. I’d even be happy to provide a ticket, subject to whatever government rules allow :)

Postscript: As noted in the comments below, a new Googlebomb more positive for Obama is now happening, where he’s ranking for cheerful achievement (see here and here for more)

Postscript 2 (Jan. 23, 7:30am Pacific): As predicted, Obama’s page is now ranking number one for failure at Google:

Postscript 3 (Jan. 23, 8:30am Pacific): Microsoft is now showing an updated description for the White House home page that reflects Obama being in office.

Postscript 4 (Jan. 23, 2:30pm Pacific): Related coverage is begining. See Techmeme, the Wall Street Journal, MediaPost, UPI, the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times.

Postscript 5 (Jan. 23, 3:50pm Pacific): Obama no longer ranks for “failure” on Google. The White House hasn’t changed anything. The link data that Google has been using to rank the Bush page — data inherited by Obama’s page — hasn’t changed. So the Googlebomb fix for this that hasn’t worked since earlier this month just happens to kick in a few hours after I post this article? That’s going to kick off another round of questioning over how “automated” that fix really is, as happened when Stephen Colbert briefly ranked for greatest living american.

Postscript 6 (Jan. 26, 8am Pacific): Google’s Matt Cutts has blogged on an official Google blog and his own blog about the issue, saying:

We do two different things — both of them algorithmic — to handle Googlebombs: detect Googlebombs and then mitigate their impact. The second algorithm (mitigating the impact of Googlebombs) is always running in our productionized systems. The first algorithm (detecting Googlebombs) has to process our entire web index, so in most typical cases we tend not to run that algorithm every single time we crawl new web data. I think that during 2008 we re-ran the Googlebomb detection algorithm 5-6 times, for example….

The defusing algorithm is running all the time, but the algorithm to detect Googlebombs is only run occasionally. We re-ran our algorithm last week and it detected both the [failure] and the [cheerful achievement] Googlebombs, so our system now minimizes the impact of those Googlebombs. Instead of a whitehouse.gov url, you now see discussion and commentary about those queries.

Reasonable enough, and Google’s said similar things before when new Googlebombs have emerged, then disappeared after attention.

But why did the “failure” Googlebomb come back? In comments on his blog, Matt wrote:

What happened there is we re-ran our algorithm in December 2008, and at that time the detection algorithm didn’t flag [failure] as a Googlebomb. We don’t claim that our detection algorithm is 100% perfect; for example, that can happen because the link structure of the web does change over time, as does how we crawl the web.

Over at Microsoft, neither the old Bush page nor the new Obama page are now ranking for miserable failure. The Bush page had been ranking for that. Why this no longer happens is unclear.

Postscript 7 (Jan. 30, 2pm): Just noticed that the White House now has implemented redirects as I suggested above. That means I’d expect to see the Obama bio drop for searches on “miserable failure” at Yahoo and Microsoft, where it currently shows (yes, it started again at Microsoft). When? I’d guess between a week and a month.

Postscript 8 (Feb 12, 11pm): Yahoo now shows Bush’s biography as number one for miserable failure, in place of where Obama was showing. At Microsoft, once again, neither the Bush or Obama pages are now ranking at all.

Google Kills Bush’s Miserable Failure Search & Other Google Bombs is my article from January 2007 that covers the history of how it came to be that for many years, a search for miserable failure on Google would bring up the official George W. Bush biography. This was due to a “Googlebomb” where many people had linked to his biography using those words in their links.

Didn’t Google fix all that? And if it’s Bush’s biography, how does that impact other US presidents?

Yes, the miserable failure “Googlebomb” was fixed at Google. However, should any future administration ever use either the words “miserable” or “failure” on the US president’s home page, there’s a good chance that page will start ranking tops again for searches like “failure” or “miserable” or even “miserable failure.” Using those words effectively overwrites Google’s “fix” for Googlebombs. My George W. Bush: A Failure Once Again, According To Google article from April 2007 covers this in more detail and illustrates how Bush ended up back at the top of Google despite its Googlebomb solution.

Meanwhile, the two other major search engines, Yahoo and Microsoft, continue to rank Bush tops.

From Yahoo, miserable failure:

And miserable failure at Microsoft Live Search:

Fair to say, the problem isn’t gone. It remains a lurking threat at Google; it’s an active issue at Yahoo and Microsoft. But how does this impact future presidents? Isn’t this Bush’s biography we’re talking about?

Yes, it is Bush’s biography. But in an inept attempt to defuse the Googlebomb, someone in Bush’s White House moved his biography to the page used by the current US president. That means when Bush goes, the next US president (Obama) inherits the problem.

Here’s how it happened. When the Googlebomb campaign started back in December 2003, people were told to use the words “miserable failure” and link to Bush’s biography here:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html

That page started ranking tops for “miserable failure,” and in September 2006, the White House appears to have had enough. They moved his biography to a new page here:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/biography.html

As for the old page, it was removed and any requests for it were “redirected” to the main page for the current US president here:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/

I think those behind this thought killing the old page would break the bomb. It might have, if they hadn’t redirected requests for the old page to a new location.

Of course, they had to do a redirect. Too many people had bookmarked the former address of the biography. But rather than redirect to the new biography page, they choose to point at the page used by all US presidents — Bush currently, Obama next and future presidents to come.

Aside from turning Bush’s search engine problem into a legacy issue for future presidents, the change is also misleading the US public and others. The redirection from the old bio page should lead to the new bio page, not require those using old bookmarks to guess at where the new location is at.

Here’s the solution. First, all past US presidents have their own biography pages on the White House site, URLs that typically end using the president’s initials and which “number” president they were. For example, George Washington, the first US president:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents/gw1.html

Ronald Reagan, the 40th president:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents/rr40.html

Bush, being the 43rd president, should have a URL like this:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents/gb43.html

I don’t understand why he hasn’t had this page all along. As I’ve covered, he did have a unique page originally that ended “gwbbio.html.” The generic “biography.html” page never existed before September 2006. In other words, there’s no long history of the current US president having their biography on a generic page that eventually will be used by other presidents. Instead, it’s entirely a creature that came out of trying to combat the Googlebomb.

My recommendation — my hope — is this.

First, that Bush’s biography immediately be moved to a new page here:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents/gb43.html

Second, change the redirect in place on this old page:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html

It should point at the new page, as a “permanent” redirect. Technical note: stop using a fast meta refresh to do this. Google still seems to treat that as a 301 permanent redirect, while Microsoft and Yahoo seem to treat it as a 302 temporary redirect (see A Short Case Study on Redirects: 301s vs. 302s for more about the differences).

Third, kill this generic biography page:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/biography.html

Instead, redirect that to the main page for all US president biographies here:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents/

Why? Because while I personally like Obama, voted for him and am pretty positive about his future, if he screws up, I don’t want future US presidents to suffer Googlebombs. Obama’s bio should be on its own standalone page from the start, using the regular URL naming convention:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents/bo44.html

Here’s hoping we’ll see some fast action. If you know someone in either administration, please spread the word.

Postscript: I’ve just noticed today that for a search on failure, the US President’s home page currently ranks in the top results:

Google’s Googlebomb fix is supposed to prevent this from happening, as long as the word “failure” doesn’t appear on that page. I don’t see the word there, either currently or in the copy of the page that Google made as part of its search process.

However it happened, it underscores why Bush should stop redirecting requests for his old biography to the current presidential home page. He leaves that page with a legacy of ranking for failure.

There are nine articles Bowers is trying to Google Bomb to the top of the Google search results. Here is a listing of them and where they currently rank now for searches on both [john mccain] and [mccain].

(1) John McCain Votes to Filibuster Minimum Wage Hike : 34th result for [john mccain] and 33rd result for [mccain].

(2) McCain economic policy shaped by lobbyist : 77th result for [john mccain] and 66th result for [mccain].

(3) Bush, McCain plug Social Security : 104th result for [john mccain] and 34th result for [mccain].

(4) McCain blasts Obama’s and Clinton’s attacks on NAFTA : not found for [john mccain] and 44th result for [mccain].

(5) McCain in NH: Would Be “Fine” To Keep Troops in Iraq for “A Hundred Years” : 21st result for [john mccain] and 85th result for [mccain].

(6) McCain: Bush right to veto kids health insurance expansion : 42nd result for [john mccain] and not found for [mccain].

(7) Senate passes expanded GI bill despite Bush, McCain opposition : 62nd result for [john mccain] and 39th result for [mccain].

(8) McCain says overturn the law that legalized abortion : not found for [john mccain] and not found for [mccain].

(9) McCain Defends Bush’s Iraq Strategy : 27th result for [john mccain] and 27th result for [mccain].

Please understand that for all searches I had personalized search off. Also note that Google’s search results are frequently changing in placement for many reasons. In this case, relevant results for John McCain are constantly being included in Google’s index, which may change placement for these results. Plus, as news sites add more stories about the same individual, Google may remove or indent some of those results.

Having said that, Google has been working to address the Google Bomb issue. In the classic George Bush example, the word ‘failure’ was not on the page. But in these cases, John McCain’s name is on the page – so it will be hard for Google to drop out these results in a Google Bomb.

For years, US President George W. Bush was tops on Google for searches on miserable failure until last year’s Googlebomb "fix" solved his problem on Google. But Bush is back, sort of. People are spotting that Bush’s official White House page is ranking tops for who is a failure on Google.

A new Googlebomb? If so, I’ve not seen any reports of people pushing to make this happen. My bet is that all those links out there with anchor text saying "failure" in them are making him come up for a variety of terms combined with "failure." And in fact, he looks to have been ranking this way for some time. (Note: initially I myself thought this was new, then a few minutes after posting, I tried a new search on Google that found evidence of it being long-standing, so I quickly adjusted this write-up).

Michael Gray noted something similar to me last month when we were talking about the anniversary of the Googlebomb fix on the Daily SearchCast. Stephen Colbert might have had his greatest living american Googlebomb defused, but switch the words around – living american greatest — and you get him.

Similarly, Bush currently ranks for a variety of queries that use words on his page along with "failure," which does not appear:

• white house failure
• oval office failure
• state of the union failure

Going back to the "who is a failure" search, one weird thing about it is the description that comes up for Bush’s page:

Article from Encarta Encyclopedia provides an overview of Bush’s life.

That description is not actually on Bush’s page. Instead, the page has a meta description tag saying:

The Oval Office contains speeches and statements of President Bush, a description of policy priorities, biographies, and photo essays.

For some reason, Google decided to ignore the meta description tag and instead go with the description of the page from the Open Directory Project as more relevant. Bad choice.

You’ll find the page listed at the ODP here. That listing incorrectly identifies Bush’s page as being an article from Encarta. The White House might want to consider using the NOODP meta tag to prevent this from happening.

You might recall the effectiveness of Google’s link bomb fix was questioned at the end of January, when the Church Of Scientology started ranking for dangerous cult. See Scientologists Google Bombed Or Not? for more background about that. In the comments to that story, you can see that it was indeed something that happened through a recent, active campaign.

The page no longer ranks — though the word "dangerous" still exists on it – so some may believe that Google simply finally made a manual addition to the list of Googlebomb "fixes" that they believe it keeps.

For its part, Google repeatedly and consistently says that Googlebombs are defused on an entirely automated basis. When I asked them about the Scientology case and why it seemed to get through at the time, Google emailed back:

Nearly a year ago, we developed an algorithm that minimizes the impact of many link bombs, or Googlebombs. It is important to note, however, that some of the detection components of this algorithm don’t run every day because Googlebombs are relatively rare.

Again, this is what Google has said before — that every so often, they run this clean-up process to find link bomb out there. But in the case of Bush, it would be odd for "who is a failure" to get defused, since no one appears to have created a pattern of linkage to make that happen in the first place — and it’s already been out there for so long.

For more background on Bush and Googlebombs, see these past stories:

• Google Kills Bush’s Miserable Failure Search & Other Google Bombs
• George W. Bush: A Failure Once Again, According To Google
• Happy First Birthday, Google Bomb Fix!