How do I drop a Google Bomb? (SEO)

Factual Questions
1

So my friend is a producer from LA who had one of her shows (imho) unfairly trashed by a theater critic in a big newspaper. Her show had a bunch of great reviews and was sold-out for quite some time until the critic came along and expressed disdain for her efforts. Despite all the other reviews being very positive, this particular newspaper’s pagerank is much higher and so years later it continues to dog her career.

Can anyone help provide some ideas as to how we might go about reclaiming atleast the first page or two of results for my friend’s name on Google? Is it going to be very difficult to get pages ranked higher than a big newspaper?

FYI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb

2

Get someone to write a positive review in a respected online publication. Or at least make sure any positive reviews are well linked to from relevant websites, have descriptive titles and can and be indexed (so anything behind paywalls is pointless).

If you can’t do that, tough. Chances are “effective” underhanded attempts at increasing page rank - especially if you’re trying to claim all of the first 20 results - will result in those pages being either removed from google altogether or artificially reduced in ranking for trying to mess with their ranking algorithm.

3

It really depends on the source of the bad review. There is page rank and then there is particular page rank.

What people fail to understand is page rank is not proportional. A page rank of 1 can be worth a million more times than page rank 10.

For instance, (I’ll make up some numbers for example)

Page rank 10

RoadRunner.Com

Page rank 7

Acme.Com

Page rank 1

OK most people assume the distance between Acme and Coyote is 10. No it’s almost certainly not

As page rank goes up the worth of that rank changes much higher.

So a page rank of 10 may be worth 10 points in the google algorithm but a page rank of 7 may be worth 20,000 points

A page rank of 1 may be worth 1 million points.

This is one of the reasons Google gets slammed. As if you have a high ranked site, your page link is worth MUCH more than a lower ranked site. So a link form Time Magazine or USAToday will propell your site up. While 50,000 links from 50,000 rank 10 sites would be worth only half as much as one link from a page rank 1 site.

Then not only does a site have a page rank but each page that is indexed has it’s own particular rank. So USAToday may have a page rank 1 and the page the review is on will be page rank 82.

Remember page ranks are for keywords. So you can be ranked high for some words and low for other words. Remember in SEO words can mean individual word or phrases.

So if this review is in a major newspaper, it probably has a huge page rank and to push it down you are going to need an opposite review in other site of equal status in Google. Getting reviews on other sites aren’t gonna help if their page rank is low.

What people fail to realize the difference between first and second place in a Google result can be tens of thousands of points.

And Google feeds points into an algorithm it is constantly changing and updating to make better.

Also links only count if they are followed, many blogs and newspaper comments (Wikipedia does this as well) are prefaced with a “No follow” tag that means the Google Spider won’t follow the link and index it. So it counts for nothing

SEO changes constantly so even if a method works it will eventually be tweeked.

Look at Search Engine Watch (dot) Org for other ideas

4

Yes, perhaps even impossible.

“Google bombing” is the act of artificially pushing a page up in the rankings. What you want to do is called “google washing” – moving a popular page down That’s awfully tough, especially if you’re trying to bump a page from a source as prominent as the LA Times. And to complicate matters, if the offending article came from a major newspaper, it’s likely it was syndicated and thus actually exists in multiple incarnations.

As Superfluous suggested, you’d be much better off if you focus on creating positive content about your friend (and her show?). That could show real and tangible benefits, where as google washing is just an artificial manipulation. You can’t really erase the bad review.

5

This is back-to-front. At least as far as the publicly available page rankings are concerned (the ones you can get from a site such as http://www.prchecker.info/), higher numbers are better, and the maximum is 10 (Google itself is PR 10). It is PR 10 that is worth millions of times more than 1. (With that point born in mind, the rest of what Markxxx says is probably true.)

Obviously Google must be using a much finer-grained ranking system internally, but presumably these public ranks do provide some sort of rough-and-ready insight into the “real” ranking system.