The terms
Google bomb and
Googlewashing refer to practices intended to influence the ranking of particular pages in results returned by the Google search engine, often with humorous or political intentions.[1] Before 2007, Google's search-rank algorithm could rank a page higher if enough other sites linked to that page using similar anchor text (linking text such as "miserable failure");[2] but Google changed the ranking by January 2007 to instead list pages about the repeated linking of that text.[2]
Google bomb is used both as a verb and a noun. The phrase "Google bombing" was introduced to the
New Oxford American Dictionary in May 2005.[3] Google bombing is closely related to spamdexing, the practice of deliberately modifying HTML pages to increase the chance of their website being placed close to the beginning of search engine results, or to influence the category to which the page is assigned in a misleading or dishonest manner.