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Bush – Tops For “Who Is A Failure” On Google

Danny Sullivan on February 21, 2008 at 6:07 pm

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:

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:

About The Author

Danny Sullivan

Danny Sullivan was a journalist and analyst who covered the digital and search marketing space from 1996 through 2017. He was also a cofounder of Third Door Media, which publishes Search Engine Land, Marketing Land, MarTech Today and produces the SMX: Search Marketing Expo and MarTech events. He retired from journalism and Third Door Media in June 2017. You can learn more about him on his personal site & blog He can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.