Dumb George or Dumb Google?

[scallihan]

There's an article today at Wired.com about how a pro-George Bush web site ranked #1 in Google for a search on "dumb motherf*cker" (* substituting here for the obvious letter) despite neither word being present, or ever having been present, in the site's content or code. It turned out that HugeDisk Men's Magazine had linked to the George Bush site using the two words, which was apparently enough to lift the Bush site to #1 for the phrase. Note that Google lists only 3,850 pages when doing a search for the exact phrase, although apparently none or few others had it in a link to them.

By the way, if you do the search now you won't come up with the same result -- others have apparently jumped on the "dumb motherf*cker" bandwagon since.

See: http://www.wired.com/news/technology..._story_related

This would seem to confirm the importance of inbound link text to Google. Any comments?

[mj2043]

If it is only one link with that keywords it is 'Dumb Google'
On the other hand it is only very few sites use the keyword, among them Bush site is top, then it is 'Dumb George'

[Woodstock]

Try typing "Miserable Failure" into Google - it brings up the profile page for Bush on the White House site.

It's all because of the inbound links - there was a huge campaign a couple of years back to get him at the number one spot in Google, and it's still working.