Manual removal of dangerous cults?

Posted on 26th February 2008 at 9:51 am by Manley

At the end of last month a group called Anonymous successfully produced a Google-bomb, targeting the Church of Scientology.

Now the SERPs have changed .

Is this the algorithm working or are we seeing an instance of manual review?

Last month I posted on a Google-bomb; Google searches for [Dangerous Cult] were returning scientology.org at #1, despite the reported algorithmic change, back in January of last year, aimed at preventing link bombs from affecting the Google SERPs.

Now searches for [dangerous cult] or [brainwashing cult], both of which were being returned at #1 in Google SERPs¹, are not anywhere to be seen. Is the algorithm working?

Since the Algorithmic change, famous Google-bombs have disappeared, most notably [Miserable failure] returning George Bush. In April 2007, however, the Whitehouse site included the word 'failure' in its page content and the US president was back up at #1 or #2 (depending on the data centre) for a short time, suggesting to many that a single word was enough to trigger the bomb to be reactivated. Scientology.org does have a single instance of the word 'dangerous' on the home page, so why is the search term [dangerous cult] not returning the church's site?

This might suggest a manual change to remove the unwanted spam. A further suggestion of this is that, for a short time, Google were treating the word [scientology] as a synonym with [cult]², another example of an embarrassing algorithmic issue which has been cleaned up this month.

So, are Google manually tidying up these gaffs? We cannot know, but my personal opinion is that, in the case of the Google-bomb at least, the disappearance is not out of keeping with the behaviour I have come to expect from the algorithm.

When George Bush was being returned for the single word 'failure' there were literally hundreds of thousands of links behind that word, as well as it appearing on the page. With Anonymous' Google-bomb the links were aimed at a variety of phrases within the structure {adjective} cult. Whilst there were a lot of links with the anchor text [dangerous cult], cult was the stronger word here and it does not appear on the page.

Currently we are seeing the link-bomb still working on some engines, but conspicuous by its absence from Google:

• Google: scientology.org is not in the top 100 results returned for [dangerous cult]
• Yahoo!: scientology.org is #2 for [dangerous cult]
• MSN: scientology.org is #1 for [dangerous cult]

Whether this change is algorithmic or manual, it makes sense. xenu.net still ranks at #3 in Google for the search term [scientology], because that site wants to rank. This is despite Legal pressure for Google to de-list xenu.net.

At the end of the day, it is in Google's interests to remove anything which artificially influences the relevance of its results. The blatent Google-bombing of scientology.org did precisely that, although how automated the removal system is has been placed in further doubt.

¹Search Engine Watch discuss the [brainwashing cult] results, whilst Search Engine Land cover the [dangerous cult] search term (including screenshots).

²First reported by Blogscoped, a screenshot is still available at Valleywag.

File under: spam google

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