We covered Google Bombing in an earlier post and how the method can be extended to influencing your own search engine rankings.
Google Bowling, however, is quite different and very real. It is used by unscrupulous online competitors whose sole interest is to sabotage your business by getting it banned or penalized from the search results.
Google opened up this possibility when it started addressing the widespread link popularity manipulation of sites obtaining an excessive number of site-wide text links (notice we mentioned excessive, one or two small site-wides shouldn’t hurt but be careful about overdoing it). Google filtered these sites by penalizing or removing the site from its database.
Unscrupulous competitors saw an opportunity in this. If buying site-wide text link ads can get their site penalized by Google, what would happen if they bought it for their competitors instead?
The implications of this technique, if unaddressed, could be devastating to small businesses affected *and* to Google. Google could suffer because the perception that search results are more relevant is the only thing that gives Google the edge in the search market at the moment. Without a positive perception of it’s search results, search users could turn to other search engines like Yahoo and MSN. Such an exodus would drive Google’s search advertising revenue down and cause it to lose huge market share. There is already a growing number of people who dislike Google’s treatment of websites.
A possible solution would be to simply discount such site-wide links altogether and not penalize it. This can be seen in Yahoo’s discounting the value of site-wide links and no longer putting a large weight behind a bunch of links coming from a few sites. Google, however, may still treat the sudden increase in links as unnatural behavior and ban it. If that happens and it really wasn’t your fault, consider a reinclusion request covered earlier.