I was waiting for a while to see if this would happen and now it seems it has indeed. A few days ago Rebecca Kelly from SEOMoz wrote a blog post recapping the in’s and out’s of SMX Advanced 2008. In the second paragraph she mentions that i visted the SEOMoz office and also links to Ayima.com using the link text Dean Chew.

Now Ayima.com ranks 2nd for Dean Chew, even though there is no mention of my name on the site, the Ayima site doesn’t link to this blog, and i dont link to the Ayima site. The only relationship between Dean Chew and Ayima.com is from Rebecca’s post.

Wikipedia describes a Google Bomb as…

A Google bomb (also referred to as a ‘link bomb’) is Internet slang for a certain kind of attempt to influence the ranking of a given page in results returned by the Google search engine, often with humorous or political intentions.[1] Because of the way that Google’s algorithm works, a page will be ranked higher if the sites that link to that page use consistent anchor text.

Now, i was under the impression that Google had really tried to stamp out the process of Google Bombing, and obviously whilst this particular case isn’t bombing (as Rebecca was simply linking to a site she knew i had a relationship with) it does indicate that with smaller volume terms such as Dean Chew the process may still work.

Here is a screen shot of the results

Now i wonder that since i have mentioned my own name in this post so many times, if i will now have the 2nd position indent for Dean Chew? Only time will tell.

I will ask Rebecca to change the link to point to this blog and keep note of how long it takes for the Ayima result to drop off so if you a reading this like a week after its posted, the results are probably not the same.

Posted in SEO/SEM