The "Arabian Gulf" google bomb
The most successful Google bomb on the internet to date would certainly have to be the now famous Arabian Gulf bomb. This was the combined efforts of hundreds of bloggers, webmasters and Persian forums who pointed links with the word Arabian Gulf to a spoof error page found at www.arabian-gulf.info.
It all started with a single blogger, the Lego Fish, who, after the outrage of the global Iranian community and indeed even the Iranian government over the National Geographic's disgraceful act of printing "Arabian Gulf" in brackets underneath the one true name for this important waterway, suggested that the online community of Iranians retaliate by "Google Bombing" the words Arabian Gulf.
The first spoof page was set up at http://www.legofish.com/arabian_gulf.htm. Within hours, dozens of bloggers had taken up the campaign and linked to this page. Within days, hundreds of Iranian websites, weblogs and Forums had linked to it.
So what exactly is the Google Bomb?
Wikipedia defines it as an attempt to influence the ranking of a given site in results returned by the Google search engine. Due to the way that Google's PageRank algorithm works, a website will be ranked higher if the sites that link to that page all use consistent anchor text.
Basically, Google has a ranking system which assigns importance to the number of links to a website and the words used to link to websites which it lists. So if there are lets say one hundred links to a site about bananas, with each link having the word banana in it, then that site will most probably come up as the first page in the Google search for bananas.
Thus, the more links which pointed to the Arabian Gulf page and with the words Arabian Gulf in the links (Just as every mention is linked on this page), the higher that page went in the Google search.
Within days of the initial suggestion for the Google Bomb, if a person was to type Arabian Gulf in a Google Search, the first result had become www.arabian-gulf.info.
In addition to the Error 404 bomb, there are now many other clever and humorous Arabian Gulf Bombs. The Google search for Arabian Gulf will reveal more bombs than it will information, not that any article containing the words Arabian and Gulf are actually credible or worthwhile pieces of information.
I have linked to many of these other google bombs in this page, so if you would like some entertainment, please click on each Arabian Gulf link (including this one). We encourage more pages devoted to ridiculing the concept of the Arabian Gulf, so if you have created a humorous page, please contact us, and let us know about it.
Source: thepersiangulf.org
Other Links:
NOWRUZ IN THE ISLAMIC PERIOD (part 6)
NOWRUZ IN THE ISLAMIC PERIOD (part 7)
