Jonah Stein from Alchemist Media hung out with some writers from the Colbert Report last week and told them about the powers of "Google-Bombing." Naturally, being the fun and mischievous crew that they are, they loved the idea and asked him if he could make Stephen #1 for "Giant Brass Balls" - he accepted, but offered them one better... to help make Mr. Colbert Google's top result for the "Greatest Living American." Tough task? Absolutely. However, I think it's possible and I'm happy to spread the meme.
If you're a fan of the Colbert Report (and really, if you're not, you probably don't enjoy SEOmoz, kittens, apple pie or sunshine either) and you run a site of any kind, be kind enough to slip it into a few posts or pages over the next few days and you'll have the opportunity to earn a nice reward from SEOmoz. What's that you say? A reward from SEOmoz? Yep.
Post a link to your creative use of the link - "Greatest Living American" in the comments below and our own Rebecca Kelley (possibly the moz crew's biggest Colbert fan) will be judge and jury and decide which of you will receive 2 (two) months of free premium membership. Even if you're a premium member, we'll tack it onto the end of your year, so there's no excuse for anyone not to participate. The deadline for links is next Monday, April 23rd, so you've even got a weekend to brainstorm.
Mr. Colbert purportedly said; "I don't know what Google-Bombing is, but I want it."
For eligibility you must:
- Link to this URL - https://www.colbertnation.com/cn/letter-from-stephen.php - from your page (no link condoms allowed)
- Use the anchor text "Greatest Living American"
- Link to your page in the comments of this post (no need to write the URL out, you can just use the WYSIWYG link button)
- Complete all this by Monday, April 23rd
Those two free months are worth $80 (Hey Matt, are those paid links?), so get to work and do us proud (and make us laugh, too).
Good luck!
OK, I think that's worked in pretty smoothly. You'd never guess which link was the imposter.
Have a look at my post on sentiment analysis in online reputation monitoring - what could be a more relevant place to identify the greatest living American?
Nice!
Well played, Will, you sneaky bastard.
Haha. Put a good word in for our entry with Ms Kelley would ya?
I don't know what it's doing to Colbert's ranking, but it sure isn't hurting my blog traffic!
See, there's all kinds of perks to playing SEOmoz games!
I think Jonah deserves to be link bombed for "Most Patriotic SEO" as well. Great stuff. Post is up.
https://www.stuntdubl.com/2007/04/18/greatest-living-american/
Now THAT is funny.
That image of Stephen's board is priceless! Not sure if it was your idea & just shipbrook + Shandyking's execution, or if it was their idea, but that is tremendous.
Finally, a tub worthy of a man like Mr. Colbert.
https://www.vintagetub.com/greatest-living-american.html
I just love it when my boss volunteers me to something, and I don't find out about it until I read the blog. I swear, he does it to make sure I actually read the blog every day :P
(kidding, Rand, this is a funny contest)
Just think of it as your project-management software. We're an outsourced team of project managers. Do you have visibility on when we'll have the deliverable for the client yet?
Ya know... you could always throw a curve ball by promoting my edit to this googlebomb -- instead of stephen colbert, let's get kurt vonnegut to the top for 'greatest living american' -- he was a copywriter too for quite some time.
...and the really ironic thing is that Colbert is Canadian... or at least he will be when I go edit his wiki page :p
Clever... but I want him to be Australian... guess you get this one as you thought of it first.... EDIT
Now I am going to change one or two of my forum signatures over on some adult webmaster boards....
Rather than get too clever (mainly because it's beyond me) I decided to slip it into one of my normal posts - it works quite well I think.
BTW - did the 'The End Is Near For SEO' post get a bit nasty or something overnight? Opened my email to see a whole load of comment notifiers, but the page is gone....
Very good :)
Bit of mutual congratulation never did anyone any harm...
Sorry for the off-topic, but what did happen to that post, last time I checked I thought it was goin pretty well?
It was gone when I checked last night at around 11pm EDT.
That post was accidentally moved into the main blog, I simply moved it back into youmoz.
I actually looked there first, as clicking on my 'previous comments' under my user profile was taking me to a 404 page (the links had ugc in them). I'm don't see that post in YouMoz right now.
Sorry to harp on this Matt, But I have the same issues as well.
Yep - it's the invisible post.....
As long as were buggin you matt, whats up with the feedburner counters you added fluctuating so much, 11000 one day 4000 the next?
Being from UK, I don't really know who Colbert is. Seen a couple of videos on youtube of him. Must be quite popular to be able to pull this off without a bad reaction.
Also good to see the seo blogs being positive about this. Good having a bit of fun every now and again... :)
I'm from South Africa and only see him youtube, etc. However, I can see why he is so popular. I'd love it if I could see him on CNN or something, so I'll ahve to make do with Conan O'Brian :)
Hey Ash. Just realised deadmoon is you...
It's a small (SEO) world.
Lol =).
Yeah, small seo world ;)
While I believe that I can lay claim to the Greatest Living 36 year old in my house, I have decided to throw Stevey-boy a bone
Oh, now that's smooth. Nicely done.
Haha sounds great to join, going to write something for sure ;)
Wow, it really worked! Cool!
So, now can you guys all band together and get me ranked #1 for "montessori materials"? Thank you sooooo much!
(Just kidding!)
ahaha, the responses thus far are most excellent. It does indeed look like Stephen's moving up in the world (or at least the SERPs).
My tribute to the Greatest Living American.
Rebecca
I doubt Jeffrey will join the contest, but you should definitely consider his post. Easily one of the best I have seen (although Todd's made me blush a little).
https://www.sixdegreesofbacon.com/2007/04/17/greatest-living-american-period/
Jonah
I don't know if you guys've seen or not but Mr. Colbert is already #8. Funny that searchenginewatch's blog is #2.
I've been trying my hardest to find Stephen's Ice Cream. It looks so delicious, but the liberals are keeping me from it.
Greatest Living American
Rand + crew,
What a phenomenal idea -- what better way to get the SEO industry (and your company) positive PR than with coverage from the Colbert Report? I can't imagine this will go under his radar...
Here's the link to my post.
Impressively, He is already up to #3
I don't see his site (or, his fansite, i think it is) in even the top 20... ?
Me neither, different datacenters perhaps. Either that or they're all smoking something.
I see a SEW link for #3, but not the actual colbertnation.com list as #3.
Is it really Googlebombing when the words "great", "live" and "American" are all on the target page? Just sounds like good linkbaiting to me.
Actually, the anti-bomb change G made recently pretty much requires that the words (or maybe some of the words) be on the page for the bomb to work. Bush's bio page fell out of the rankings for [failure] because of Google's change, but popped back into position when they put the word "failure" on the page.
Anyway, I'm in. Well, not yet, but I'll throw a link into my SEO Cats post (Don't forget: your beastie can get listed in there too!) later today.
[On edit] Yeah, what oggy said.
Hot and sexy time.
https://www.fatinfo.com/blog/2007/a-good-nightly-exercise/
Cthulhu rises!
That didn't take long. And this page (seomoz) is #6 at the moment... :)
Colbert is great!
we've put our link in place for the Greatest Living American!
https://www.designwithsubstance.com/journal.htm
Oh God, I have included myself in this...
Why Google has to work very hard
The colbert is near the end of article.
this guy is also competing for The Greatest Living American... Apparently, "I may not have his [Colberts] legions of people, but this is about SEO, and his followers don't have my friends Google Rank." ;)
i wasn't thinking with creating the blogspot blog - a brand new site might not really help this whole thing
so i went to my myspace page and threw something on my blog there
and gave it a link on my profile page as well.
This may be seen as somewhat contrived, as it's essentially a 'splant' into an article I wrote many years ago (and recently resurrected on one of my blogs), but if it helps in defining the greatest living american then it will be worth it...
https://brownenvelope.wordpress.com/2007/04/18/gardai-react-to-london-threat/
Someone is bidding on "greatest living american" with the description "Greatest Living American - Paulina, call me" and sending them to the wikipedia page.
https://neverfollow.blogspot.com/
I had the Colbert Nation blogrolled, so I just changed the visible text to "Greatest Living American"
Greetings from Hungary :)
Maybe you remember a story from Hungary, which is connected to Mr. Colbert: the people had the chance to decide the name of a bridge. Mr. Colbert heard the news, and he decided to win this vote - and he won.
Sadly, because Mr. Colbert doesn't speak Hungarian, and he is not dead, there is no way to name after him this bridge. ;-)
So, as a compensation, I'm prodly helping him to win the Greatest Living American title in the Google SERP. :D
Colbert Nation now showing as #1 in Google for Greatest Living American
I see it as #9 when I click your link, thats a big difference for datacenters isnt it?
I have it as number one as well.... but the site is down... we sent too much traffic.
you've got your contribution from France to this wonderful achievment. Here it is on Search Engine Feng Shui.
w00w 115 comments, that guy will get a nice googleboomb :)
...with 30 or so links posted for Rebecca to go through (so far) :)
I'm seeing the site's home page at #1, followed by letter-from-stephen.php (on a SERP of 50 results). Have people not been linking to the letter page?
I don't know if you've seen this, but searching for the term "Greatest Living American" in Google shows colbertnation.com in THE 1ST PLACE!
WE DID IT!
Everyone should know that it appears that googlebombing is alive and well, until "greatest living american" appears somewhere on the page.
Here is google's cache of colbertnation.com, notice this:
These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: greatest living american
This could happen if those words appeared somewhere on those pages recently, as miserable failure recently popped up.
Also, currently colbertnation.com is down.
Considering that Colbert has taken his brass balls all the way to the hallowed halls of Congress, I'd say that he deserves everyone's vote!
OK, theory time, folks.
The term "greatest living American" doesn't appear on either of the pages people have been linking to. In fact, none of the words do. However, all three of the words do show up on the site, on a number of pages. In fact, this page includes all three words.
Rand has written about the somewhat controversial concept of domains carrying weight, which goes against the old "search engines rank pages, not sites" consensus. Is it possible that the presence of the words on the site are enough to allow the bomb to work? What would happen if we all linked to some page using anchor text that doesn't appear anywhere on the domain?
I agree the content on the page should be a factor and where the links point should as well.... but it is in the second spot now so the power of the domain as a consideration needs to be explored...
wow, that didn't take long. :-D
Stephen Colbert has straight up power: https://www.unboundedition.com/content/view/479/50/
Totally forgot about this propping the greatness contest! With an Hour and two minutes to spare!
Here's my support of the almighty at SnoopBloggyBlawg.com.
Heres my site:globalwarming awareness2007 [www.theycann.com]
The interesting thing is the Colbert home page is ranking and not the target page we are all pointing our links to. Very interesting, LOL.
Wow - that didn't take long.
Stephen Colbert rules my world.
I spent the whole week building a 50-page EL Civics tribute to my hero :) Stephen is now included on a site that has units about our Greatest Non-Living Americans, too.
It even includes a Stephen Colbert Crossword Puzzle with true information. Did you know Ben & Jerry's named an ice cream cone after him? But of course they did-- he's the Greatest Living American.
I've also now written a more serious (ahem!) piece on this very worthy topic!
Always up for a spot of malinky business.
Love it. Here's my ode to Mr. Colbert:
Believe it or Not, Colbert is the Greatest American Hero
-Dustin
Nice entry, but if you're as young as you look in the picture, it's perfectly understandable that you got the name of the TV show wrong. It was called The Greatest American Hero, (believe it or not) not "America's Greatest Hero".
Thanks Glad. I'm young enough for it to be a faint childhood memory, but old enough that it could be a case of lysdexia ;) I fixed the reference.
That was quick.
Ahh the power of the mob!
Very funny article.
Jon West approves.
:)
I'm having a light day at work and i came to the office knowing i wanted to have some seo/smo fun.
So i created a Blogger blog to participate in these shenanigans...
and a squidoo lens
I don't know if a Digg link will help, but I submitted the colbert nation link with Greatest Living American as the subject line. Digg it here
Right now, for me, Stephen's up at no. 2. But... Kurt Vonnegut, who is dead, is at 6. I think it'd be more fitting to get Kurt at the top. I'm not particularly famous or interesting, but right here and right now, I'm declaring my own contradictory Googlebomb for Kurt Vonnegut..
Umm, Bud, while I certainly appreciate your sentiment (as I too am a fan of Mr. Vonnegut), it's awfully hard to be the Greatest LIVING American when you're dead.
New title for you: "Manager of the Obvious"
As a writer/musician/artist, you're never gone. Vonnegut's work will continue on.
And if you read Vonnegut, him winning or being the greatest living american in death fits his ironic nature quite nicely.
I'm a huge Vonnegut fan, too, Bud, but I think the irony aspect that makes the bomb so compelling would be entirely lost with Vonnegut.
Agree to disagree. Looks like you win with 3 thumbs up and my neutral. A thumbs down, really?
Okay no time to write something creative so may go back later tonight...
https://www.smart-keywords.com/2007/04/greatest-living-american.htm
This one even gives you guys a link!
https://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/070418-141843
I love it.
https://www.searchenginelowdown.com/2007/04/i-love-spam.html
I thought Google's last update made bombing a thing of the past. I can't remember the actual article, since there are more SEO journalists these days then there are grains of sand on all the beaches of the world. But I do seem to recall Google monitoring links to see if a large number crop up all at once with the same anchor text.
Is everyone sure this isn't just making it <i>harder</i> to get Mr. Colbert listed as the Greatest Living American?
Take what you read from Google with a grain of salt. The PR line is not always reality.
Here is a link to my page:
The Greatest Living American is…Stephen Colbert...Brass Balls and Googlebombing
I love the Colbert Report.
He is the "Greatest Living American"
This is a pretty funny idea, however with Google's new Google bombing filter, wouldn't Colbert need to write those 3 words on his page to appear on the 1st position in google for that query?
If those 3 words don't appear on the page, then it won't come up in the 1st spot. This happened with the "miserable failure" google bomb, it was deactivated and when they added the word "failure" on the page (speaking about congress), it went back up!
You'd think so, but why does Rebecca Kelley rank for Oswald Cobblepot? (all links, those words don't actually appear on the page). We had a post about it a few weeks ago.
Just a small thought, but really, getting it to #1 won't be too hard. a 3 word phrase, and the current results don't currently really seem "targetted" (either on purpose or not) for this phrase.
Not half as "compeitive" as failure... ;)
I can see this showing results quite quickly.
Which is why it's mostly for fun. Two of the Top Five results for the phrase are currently blog posts about this endeavor.
Count me in it, I just need to think about what to write first before I do it, I'd post the link to my post when I get home =)
Finally got home (seems like I live one day away from work eh?), so I finished my post "Can blogging make you rich or not?", completely unrelated to anything, but somehow I managed to drop that link in there. Hope its educational to people who don't already know the answer to that question.
Nice! I'll add mine soon enough.
I love it!
However, I did notice that there are already a couple of results about Stephen on Google's first page...
And does he deserve a special mention on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greatest_American if he gets to the top ;)
Here's my attempt. I need to find Colbert's googlebomb clip. Sounds like it could have a lot of potential....
Hey my blog post at SEW is number two for Greatest Living American....
have to see if I can get them to do a 301 redirect for it now!
I'm joining in the fun!
I posted on 2 of my sites:
MirRU and SATAgun
Rand thanks for a great blog!
Valik.
EDIT: I think I missed the point about writing a post of somesort. Anyway, I'll think of something over the weekend to replace the borring paragraph I wrote.
I did something simple because I run a tumblelog: https://vozzon.tumblr.com/post/1041496
Added to my news.
Looks like someone was kind enough to submit this to digg
It's in the top 10 hottest upcoming stories, everyone go digg it so it makes the homepage
Doh! nevermind - it just made popular
(Lets see if it gets buried)
Is that what caused the site to go down for most of this afternoon (UK time)?
Well, the Colbert Nation website is down now... too much traffic for him to handle.
Its still down, cmon Colbert.
15 minutes on the front page and it was buried, go figure
ahahaha, this looks interesting :) I can't wait to see the response :D
Too much fun... entry #2 from me for the contest ;)
fak3r approves of Stephen, who knew he had it in him?
https://fak3r.com/
Don't see the anchor text "Greatest Living American" on your page...
It's in the blog roll with the text Colbert Report...
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
Maybe someone can digg my post to get some exposure in the not so SEO friendly world.
OK, mine is up. You just have to scroll past all the pictures to get to it. I hope everyone is remembering to tag their posts as well.
Very cool. Count me in.
You bet I will help I really believe in helping others if you want to get help in return.
And your avatar really goes well with that comment (sorry ... random thought, that's all...)!
I caught the clip of this the other day, so freaking funny. I think it's impressive that is has already showed up so high on Google. Seems like Google Bombing is still alive and well.
The major competition is for sites naming Greatest Living American X - writer being 3 entries and the top one above mine is for the American Living Award.... so a few links with mixed terms may help this along too....
No time to get creative today, but I must agree, Colbert is the greatest living american and I attribute all my success to him.
The idea was to include tha anchor text in a link to his page! ;)
If you look at the page you will see I did ;)
Yeah -- but i just meant because you made the anchor text "greatest living american" and linked to your page (on your post). =)
By linking to my website with "greatest living american" and then on the landing page of my site linking colbert using the same anchor text, it is theorized to help colbert's page.
Anchor Text A equaling Anchor Text B actually helps Anchor Text B carry more weight.
At least on normal links. All the links in these comments are nofollowed so it doesn't matter in the end :D
Yeah, *lol*, it wasn't a "dig" at you or anything. Was just kidding around! :) (but then, i do think you know that i wasn't being really serious!)
so much for google "defusing the google bomb" -_-`. If anything I'm disappointed that it worked so well.
But since we know it works, we must only use our powers to better human kind
After the shame Stephen Colbert caused those poor Oshawa Generals, Why I'd like to Google bomb him something, alright!
I am happy to see he is moving up in the world. From Mr Goodwrench to The Greatest Living American.
Is promoting google bombing a good idea for a site that is supposed to be educational about SEO?
"SEOmoz, a Seattle-based search engine optimization company, serves as a hub for search marketers worldwide, providing education, tools, resources and paid services."
I see the fun part of it, I love Colbert as well, but this is not Comedy Central, it's the real world...
Bah, stop being a spoil-sport :p
Hi Carfeu, I actually find this kind of thing pretty educational - in terms of it being the only real way to watch how Google deals with this kind of volume of links etc.
It's for each individual to make the call about before creating a link, I guess - my feeling is it didn't harm anyone (not sure where I would have a genuine 'greatest living American' link going) and it's therefore just a bit of fun that also gives us a bit of a peek into how Google views this kind of thing.
I also don't think it's too out of character - the sense of humour at the mozplex is skewed towards Colbert etc. so I think it's all good fun.
I have to agree with Will on his response to this - what I don't agree with is down-thumbing someone (in this case Carefu) just because they happen to have a different (but entirely valid) point of view.
Yeah - this down thumbing is turning this a little bit like digg. Just turning into a popularity contest ;)
ps - it needs a name. Like "digging" and "burying" !
Yeah - it's a bit ambiguous whether a thumb down means 'I disagree' (thumbs up seems to mean anything from 'I agree', through 'that was funny', to 'you're my friend').
Thumbs down could do with differentiating into 'I disagree' and 'you idiot' - I don't think anyone's calling Carfeu an idiot - it's a very reasonable position, though open to disagreement.
One good thing about the voting on seomoz rather than Digg is that at least there aren't mass "burying". Everyone here seems to vote up really and be friendly. Which is good =)
The Digg (sorry for going on about digg ... it is just very similar ... and we know a lot of seo-ers use/submit to/spam digg...) community is quite ... unfriendly.
Anyway, judging from shanada's ";p", i don't think he was being too serious (and hey ... (s)he's only got 1 thumb down...)
No - I meant the 2 down-thumbs carefu got for expressing the dissenting view in the first place...
carefu - I think it's an excellent question and one worthy of talking about. As others have noted, it's a great opportunity to not only learn something about how Google handles links, but about how far a viral idea like this can spread.
BTW - My feeling is that thumbs down aren't deserved here - they're really not for agreeing/disagreeing, but much more for if you enjoy the content or believe it contributes positively to the experience here at SEOmoz.
I was just expressing an opinion. Thumbs down are also opinions, so I respect them as well. No problem with that. :)
Good answer. This kind of civil conversation is what makes the 'moz comments pages such a nice place to be :)
I'm Currently in the Number Two Spot for "Greatest Living American" and I won't give it up easily. I'm throwing down the Guantlet, and Sticking up for the Little Guy. I may not have Fame, or Money, or Looks, or Armies of Minions posting how great I am.... But I have.... I'm not sure but I suspect it it Giant and Round...
<a href="https://www.xyhd.tv/2007/04/rants-and-tangents/brandon-wirtz-is-the-greatest-living-american/" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to Brandon Wirtz is the Greatest Living American">Brandon Wirtz is the Greatest Living American</a> And he Is coming for you C-Train, he's Coming for you.
You must be getting a fairly big sudden traffic spike at the moment?
FYI that link is nofollowed
The least you could do was to link properly man
what is this going to achieve?
annoy people who use search engines for legitimate purposes.
these kind of actions force search engines to take drastic measures, making the SE landscape more confusing, meaning SEO hucksters can make more money. totally unethical.
are SEO's the dodgy mechanics of the 21st century??? i am starting to think so.
Google has made the claim that they have link bombing defused. We're really just testing to see if that's really the case.
It's also a bit of harmless fun. We're not messing up any legitimate searches, because the proper, most relevant result to a search for the "greatest living American" is really a matter of personal opinion, not keyword density, and not link popularity and anchor text.
The Greatest living american is a matter of personal opinion, the people who actually add the link would really need to believe that to add the link anyways. If performing this task ruins search engine results, then linking should be banned from the first place.
Just take note to yourself that any type of linking with an anchor text is usually a subjective statement made by the person putting the link up. Non SEO bloggers ahve been doing it since the dawn of blogging, and thanks to this, relevancy has been established on SEs.