Yesterday afternoon, the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog posted an update on the status of so-called "Googlebombs".  Sometimes called a linkbomb because of the fact that they are not specific to Google, a Googlebomb is a "prank" that involves large amounts of sites intentionally using the same phrase to link to a certain website in order to make that website rank high for the phrase.  Did you get all that?

Remember the whole fiasco about George W. Bush's biography ranking first for the term "miserable failure"?  That was a Googlebomb.  A bunch of website owners got together and linked to the biography with the words "miserable failure" as the link text.  The computers that determine search rank at Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask and other search engines use the number of links pointing to a site, and the text associated with those links, to rank sites.  So when several hundred or thousand websites linked to the Bush biography with the terms "miserable failure", search engines assumed that the biography had something to do with "miserable failure".

And the Bush Googlebomb isn't the only one.  It's just the most widely publicised one.  For years Google has tolerated the practice.  But according to the Google Webmaster Central Blog post, a small change in the Google algorithm has been introduced to limit the effect of Googlebombs on SERPs.  According to the post, the change is very small.  So small, in fact, that it shouldn't affect sites other than the ones being Googlebombed.

Indeed, a search for "failure" or "miserable failure" on Google returns the legitimate pages for that phrase… but none of the sites that had been Googlebombed with it.

Danny Sullivan has written an excellent recap and history of the Googlebomb, including detailed accounts of the trials and tribulations associated with the Bush Googlebomb.  As he points out, Google hasn't released details on what exactly was done to solve the problem but it has apparently worked.  Speculation abounds as people try their hands at figuring out just what was done.  All we know is that nothing was edited by hand - algorithm changes did all the work.

Yahoo, MSN, and Ask.com all still rank Bush's bio as the #1 or #2 result for those terms.  Will they follow-suit and address the issue now?