August 29, 2007 3:56 pm 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).
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Holy typo backlinks!
*Jealous*
Comment by David — August 31, 2007 @ 4:01 am
FAN-tastic!
Comment by Eric — August 31, 2007 @ 7:50 am
Now if only somebody will mis-type a website that is easily confused with one of mine.
Comment by Tanner Christensen — August 31, 2007 @ 8:47 pm
Nice catch
Comment by Simon Heseltine — September 1, 2007 @ 4:58 am
I bet you were having a blast delving into that. One of my favorite things to do in SEO is play detective.
Good find, great post.
imho, Google.com may have made some changes to try to prevent Googlebombing for more targeted phrases, or hot topics, but they give so much weight to links that it would be near impossible to completely prevent such a thing from happening.
I wonder how long it will take for Mr. Cutts and the team to clean up that serp.
I’d be willing to bet it will have to be a manual edit.
And a note to Open Source Web Design: ouch, that bites.
Comment by Zak Nicola-NobleSEO — September 1, 2007 @ 1:06 pm
There was a test recently on a forum where a bunch of webmasters linked to a blog for the keyword “viagra” (or something very competetive) and ranked first page.
Comment by Oleg — September 1, 2007 @ 2:12 pm
This was a great find and very interesting for domainers as well. We’ve all heard of traffic from people mistyping URLs in their address bar, but typo backlinks to boost PR? Pretty sweet!
Comment by Brian — September 1, 2007 @ 3:43 pm
can someone email me to explain how to link bomb? newsletters@qualifiedimpressions.com
thanks
Comment by Mikey — September 1, 2007 @ 6:38 pm
[...] Link bombing still works. Even by accident. (28 Sphinns) Discusses an amusing case of accidental link bombing that propelled the “Outdoor Women of South Dakota” to the top of the search ranks for “OSWD”. What’s this? How search engines work (or don’t as the case may be.) [...]
Pingback by SEO Industry: Ethical Valuable Service Industry : Big Bucks Blogger — September 1, 2007 @ 7:01 pm
@Simon: Thanks
@Zak: That SERP might be cleaned up manually, but if Google has to edit each SERP that looks like this manually, they have to hire some extra people
@Oleg: Did you mean something like this?
@Mikey: Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bombing
Comment by Wiep — September 1, 2007 @ 7:53 pm
Even in the dutch Search Engine world we know these kind of usage. Look at the top ten on “Zoekmachine Marketing”. 1 is overthere with few backlinks, recently started and i guess you know wich one i mean Wiep!
Comment by Gerben — September 2, 2007 @ 10:50 pm
[...] Great find by Wiep.net. [...]
Pingback by LinkJuicy » Blog Archive » The Link Bomb Still Works A Treat — September 3, 2007 @ 6:13 am
Wow. Purchasing miss speelings of domain names may be worth while afterall.
Comment by Wholesale — September 3, 2007 @ 5:33 pm
I never believed this fairy tale “Google Bombing is over”. In fact it works still brilliant. However: Some keywords with fierce competition are under Google´s surveillance of course. For instance keywords concerning credit, assurance etc. No wonder - you can earn a bunch of money there… So you should be aware, no to use too much (!) bombs. Make a good link mix and the results are fabulous.
Always ask yourself the question: how looks a natural link-growth alike? And the success will follow !
Comment by Preseo — September 3, 2007 @ 8:39 pm
[...] said sounds like because it is not really over. I end up on a nice read on Weip.net where he found that the link bombing still works, even [...]
Pingback by SEO and BackLinks Power | SEO Optimization | Search Engine Optimization (SEO) — September 5, 2007 @ 1:36 pm
linkbombing rulez
hahaha
Comment by microdesign webdesign — September 6, 2007 @ 4:37 pm
[...] Here is a great example on a site ranking thru incoming links alone. http://www.oswd.org is of course number 1 for Open Source Web Design , but on page 2 for the term you can see Outdoor Women of South Dakota. Why? Because when people link to oswd.org, they accidentally switched the w and the s and linked to owsd.org instead. [...]
Pingback by FrogEngine.com - The Blog » Link bombing works with Google — September 9, 2007 @ 2:30 pm
[...] So whilst taking-down Google is futile, taking-down some one using Google isn’t, but it does come at a cost - Man Arrested for Google Bombing Polish President Into Top Spot For “Kutas” (Penis). Whilst on the topic - Link bombing still works. Even unintentionally. [...]
Pingback by SiteMost’s Weekly Blog Recap 13/09/07 at Brisbane SEO Blog — September 13, 2007 @ 3:46 pm
That shows you just how careful you have to be when generating your links with advertising…
I wonder how much revenue was lost by the bad links?
The free advertising must of driven a fair amount of traffic to the wrong site to get it ranked that high.
I must agree, I would LOVE to have someone accidentally send all their traffic to my site.
Comment by Bittenbydesign — September 14, 2007 @ 1:03 am
[...] on WIEP they found that link bombing or commonly called google bomb isn’t over yet! Well this gives [...]
Pingback by SEO MegaCorp News Blog » Blog Archive » Is link bombing really over! — October 21, 2007 @ 9:24 am
[...] came across this post about Googlebombing and it reminded me of something I noticed while checking my ranking for my own keywords, affordable [...]
Pingback by why googlebombing still works — November 24, 2007 @ 5:32 pm