Blog

The Mitt Romney Google Bomb Incident

Having seen the tweet by Rand Fishkin  this morning about the new Googlebomb “complete failure” I couldn’t resist typing it into Google.com image search. And, this is the result…

A funny, but very embarrassing search results page dominated by Mitt Romney. So is this another result of Google Bombing?

Google Bombing is when a person or group of people try and make a webpage rank for a certain term by encouraging others to link to the page using the keywords. Other famous examples are the George Bush Google Bomb in 2006 when he was the victim of bloggers Google Bombing him for the term “miserable failure”, have a look at this blog post for more examples. Google later changed the algorithm to filter Google Bomb manipulation, see the image  from Search Engine Land below:

So is this the latest Google Bomb?

No, Romney has actually unintentionally associated himself with the term “completely wrong” when he retracted his previous comments as “completely wrong” about 47% of Americans being government freeloaders. A Google spokesman has confirmed that this is not an intentional “Google Bomb”. So it is a natural result of Google’s search algorithm.

It seems Romney has managed to smear himself on Google images. Unfortunately for Romney the more internet users search the term the more reinforced the phrase result, so it isn’t likely to change anytime soon. Go on, have a look, you know you want to!

• Tweet