September 16, 2005
An actor friend asked me about the ability to change search results on Google. The problem is that although he has received mostly good reviews for the numerous shows and plays he has performed in, apparently when you google his name, the first result that pops up is a link to a director from an early play he performed in which he received a horrible review. Worse, the highlighted text is actually the worst part of the review, much to my friend's chagrin. My question is whether it's possible to somehow change the search results for his name. He doesn't have a website so he can't pump the meta tag. I told him about google bombing (Failure=Bush etc.) but I don't know enough about it to tell him if it would work in his case or how to go about it. Any ideas? TIA as always. This really is a friend and not me doing the equivalent of saying "Doc, my 'friend' has a small sore on his genitals- what should I tell him?" is case any of you were thinking it. Cause I know some of you think like that, bad monkeys!
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Well, to start you could lift the curtain on the mystery and provide a link to a good review of his. If typing in his name brings up this bad review then provide another hyperlink (maybe use his name?) on the web that points to a good review. I dunno much about gaming search engines or what sort of pull a mofi thread would have with google, but it couldn't hurt. could it?
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I dunno much about gaming search engines or what sort of pull a mofi thread would have with google *gasp* Actually, I've found that MoFi *does* have pretty good pull with google. Maybe you want to link to a good review (in your profile for example, so it's not a blatant "self-link") hyperlinking with his name. It's a start anyhow... Also depends on his name I guess (i.e., is it common or not). Not having any experience "google bombing," I cannot say for sure.
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The more positive web-presence the better, I think. If your friend doesn't have a website, he should probably get one set up. Websites are relatively cheap, and rapidly becoming a prerequisite for any kind of marketing (including marketing yourself). Also, as an actor, getting your bio on IMDB might help too. More on google bombing from Wikipedia.
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Google evaluates links and factors them into the ranking for a site based on a number of factors. A couple of the primary factors are 1. is it a link farm (if so, they work very hard to discredit the link in terms of it's impact on the site ranking), 2. is the site where the link is located related to the topic at all. For example, my Huron River site ranks well with any search for Huron River because I've worked very hard to get links at related sites (environmental sites, fishing sites, parks sites, even government sites related to recreation and environment). AND, the significance of having a link from a specific site is relative to that sites own rank. It gets a bit complicated. If the quality of his web presence is really important to him (which I doubt, given that he doesn't have his own site in an world where sites are almost free!) your friend would want create his own site and would have to spend a lot of time making contact with related sites requesting links, it takes time to make the contacts, it takes time for it to have any impact on google. As it is, he is at the mercy of anyone who puts his name on a web site...
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I may have managed to change Google's search results (unintentionally) once. I put a link to a particular web page into the signatures I used on several discussion sites. These were sites I had participated in for some time, and the signatures were changed retroactively, meaning that a site where I had 500 posts suddenly contained 500 links to my target. These were large, established sites, so I guess Google "trusted" these new links pretty well. I was only trying for the attention of the other discussion site participants, but my target site bubbled up quite high in the Google results shortly thereafter. It's still there now, two years later.
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Lagged2Death - I was actually going to utilize that to googlebomb a previous employer that owes me money - I was going to post an article about him on my website, and link to it in sigs on a half-dozen forums that I frequent. I didn't realize it had a term, though.
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That's a sweet discovery there, Lagged!
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How about we monkeys all googlebomb each others websites on our own blogs, journals and websites! I know I'd sure love to drive traffic to mine. Would that trigger a linkfarm red flag at google for such nepotistic inbreeding?
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I've recently discovered on my personal website that Google considers words in the URL very highly when ordering results. Thus, calling a page your-friends-name.html should get quite a decent ranking to start with, even before any other factors are considered.