Link bombing still works. Even unintentionally.

Although Google stated that Googlebombing would become very difficult in the future, SERPs show still examples of pretty good results. Most of them are intentional, some are by accident.
The example below (thanks for the tip, Hamoedie ;) ) is a great example of an accidental, but very effective, link bomb.

The web design market is very competitive, even a phrase like “Open Source Web Design” shows 350 million results. Number one is oswd.org, like the screen shot below shows. With over 225k links, that isn’t a big surprise.

The first page is very relevant to the search query I used, so no comments here. The second page, however, starts with a really strange and very irrelevant listing: The Outdoor Women of South Dakota. In short, that’s the owsd.

The domain names Oswd.org and Owsd.org differ by no more than one letter, so some thing’s fishy. Let’s dig into the backlinks of the second site for a bit, there must be a reason why they’re ranking for “Open Source Web Design”.
Yahoo indicates that the Outdoor Women of South Dakota have collected a stunning sum of 135 backlinks. Several of these backlinks are located in the footer of websites like TheSnoopyPenguin.com, with the anchor text “Open Source Web Design”. In stead of linking to oswd.org, some websites accidentally linked to owsd.org. Apparently, a few typos are enough to let the website of the South Dakota Outdoor Women rank for (total irrelevant) web design related terms.

This not only shows that link bombing still works (I never thought it didn’t work anymore, btw), but it also proves that anchor text is really important (like we didn’t know that) and it also is an indication that footer links aren’t as worthless as some say they are (nice to see some proof again).