The Alchemy of Search

Danny Sullivan wrote about our successful bomb Friday. Beside the fact that he enjoyed the Mission Accomplished post, Mr. Sullivan provided his analysis about the reasons our recent Google Bombing campaign was successful in spite of the fact that Google defused Google Bombing a few months ago. Mr. Sullivan observed that:

The Colbert Report’s home page uses NONE of the words (because Stephen, who is
modest, has no need to declare himself the greatest). Here’s Google confirming that the site ranks for that term solely based on links to it:

See the part at the bottom: “These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: greatest living american.”

So what’s the deal? Wasn’t the Google fix supposed to prevent this exact thing?

Yes, actually. Of course, we’ve had a few exceptions cited, such as click here ranking things like Adobe and Apple downloads. Maybe Google’s Matt Cutts will come along to shed some more light on the situation. I suspect the answer will be that the link bomb fix Google uses is more sophisticated than just looking to see if the words people are using in links, when a lot of links suddenly point at a page, actually appear on a page.

We originally targeted the “letter from Stephen” page and the “Balls For Kidz” pages for the campaign by choosing pages that already contained some of the target keywords in an attempt to get around the anti-bombing changes. What Mr. Sullivan is pointing out here is that because Google ranks the homepage first and the target pages below that for “greatest living american”, their anti-bombing algorithm is more subtle than we would assume from the appearance and disappearance of failure.

By contrast, Google ranks the “balls for kidz” page first for “giant brass balls” and doesn’t show the homepage at all.

This is diagnostically very interesting for SEO because one page has the words and the other doesn’t. The other data point that we can provide is that many people chose not to include the Giant Brass Balls campaign in their viral contributions. Google blog search indicates 17,972 posts in the last 8 days contain “greatest living american” versus 3,205 for “giant brass balls”.

On a related topic, how much traffic did this campaign send to ColbertNation.com? Any advertisers out there who can tell us?

Before this campaign started, neither Colbert Nation nor Comedy Central ranked for “greatest living american” or “giant brass balls”. Comedy Central ranked about 22nd for “truthiness.”

As of 1:41 pm pst on 4/23/2007, Colbertnation.com ranks #1 for “giant brass balls” on Google, MSN and Yahoo and #1 on Google, #3 on Yahoo and #3 on MSN for “greatest living american.” Comedy Central is up to #10 for truthiness.

My original post hit the homepage of Digg for 14 hours starting about midnight on 4/15 and received about 26,000 visitors by Monday, 4/16. Greg Jarboe at Search Engine Watch posted on Monday. His post hit the SERP by Tuesday along with my Alchemist Media post and one from the Bacon Nation. Colbert Nation started to move up.

On Wednesday afternoon, after SEOmoz joined the party and brought along a bunch of other SEO folks, Alchemist started both phrases in Adwords to judge the number of people running the query. We have seen 27,600 impressions in Google for “greatest living american” in the last 5 days. We got another 4074 on “giant brass balls” before Google decided our quality score was too low and that we would need to spend $10/click to keep it active. That’s too much to pay for data!

Direct traffic sources include at least 1 homepage Digg for Search Engine Land, a CNet News story and about 19,000 blog posts. Only Comedy Central can tell us for sure, but I have to guess this campaign has been worth at least 150,000 visitors in the last week.

I have heard numerous complaints the week of ColbertNation.com going down. Of course, ColbertNation.com seems to go down fairly regularly even without the Google Bomb.

It’s amazing how little Viacom seems to understand the web!

Admiral Fishkin, Captain Rohrs, Fellow Officers, Diggers and Bloggers of the SEO world, my fellow Americans: Major combat in operation Giant Brass Balls have ended. In the Battle of the Greatest Living American, Colbert Nation and our allies have prevailed. And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing our hard earned ranking.

In this battle, we have fought for the cause of liberty, and for a piece of the SERP. Our nation and our coalition are proud of this accomplishment — yet it is you, the members of the Colbert Nation Strike Force, who achieved it. Your courage — your willingness to face danger for your country and for each other — made this day possible. Because of you, our nation is more secure. Because of you, the tyrant has fallen, and Serpia is free.

Operation Giant Brass Balls was carried out with a combination of precision and speed and boldness the enemy did not expect and the world had not seen before. From distant sites and blogs at sea, we sent links and anchors that destroyed the rank of our opposition and propelled a single target to the top. Webmasters and bloggers charged to the top across hundreds of intervening sites in one of the swiftest advances of ranking in search history. You have shown the world the skill and the might of Search Engine Optimization paired with the passion of Colbert Nation.

This nation thanks all of the members of our coalition who joined in a noble cause. We thank the Armed Forces of SEOmoz, The Bacon Nation, and SE Watch, who shared in the hardships of war. We thank all of the citizens of Digg who welcomed our troops and joined in the liberation in support of half a dozen guerrilla attacks. And tonight, I have a special word for Secretary Jarboe, for Generally Frank, and for all the men and women wear the flag of the Colbert Nation: Alchemist is grateful for a job well done.

The character of our military through history — the daring of Wikiality, the fierce courage of The White House Correspondents Dinner, the decency and idealism that turned enemies into allies — is fully present in this generation. When Serpian civilians looked into the faces of our servicemen and women, they saw strength, and kindness, and a sick sense of humor. When I look at the members of the Colbert Nation Strike Force, I see the best of our country, and I am honored to have served – temporarily- as your commander in chief.

In the images of fallen idols, we have witnessed the arrival of a new era. For a dozen years of search wars, culminating in the Google age, search technology was designed and deployed to inflict order on an ever-growing scale. In defeating keyword spam and imperial monopolies, Allied Forces destroyed entire portfolio, while leaders who escaped with golden parachutes and vested stock options. Market power was used to end regimes by breaking a company. With new tactics and precision weapons, we can achieve comedic objectives without directing violence against civilians. No device of man can remove the tragedy from war or avoid the detritus left behind by our campaign. With apologies to the brass ball industry, it wiil be a great advance when the politicians have far more to fear from search results than innocent, if obscure, awards.

In the images of celebrating SEO warriors, we have also seen the ageless appeal of victory. Decades of lies and intimidation could not make the Serpian people love their oppressors or desire their own enslavement. Men and women in every culture need natural search engine ranking like they need food and water and air. Everywhere that #1 position arrives, some human rejoices.

We have difficult work to do in Serpian. We are bringing order to parts of the results page that remain dangerous. We are pursuing and finding leaders of the old regime, who will be held to account for their crimes. We have begun the search positioning using biological weapons. We have already disclosed hundreds of sites that will be investigated. We are helping to rebuild Serpian, and we will stand with the writers of the show as they learn to establish a government of, by, and for the people of Colbert Nation. The transition from dictatorship to democracy took startling little time, but it is worth every effort. Our coalition will stay until our work is done. And then we will leave — and we will leave behind a new segment on our favorite show.

The Battle of Serpia is one victory in a war on hypocrisy that began on April 15, 2007. That terrible morning, three very tired men straggled home from New York — gave America and the civilized world a glimpse of their ambitions. They imagined, in the words of one bomber, that April 15th would be the "beginning of a really awesome new segment and maybe a chance to get a new client." By seeking to turn our web pages into tools of subversive ideas, Google Bombers and their allies believed that they could prove to this nation the power of our combined voices and force a new awareness on the world. It only took 7 days!.

Thank you for serving our country and our cause. May God bless you all, and may God continue to bless Stephen Colbert!

The campaign to get the Colbert Show to rank for Giant Brass Balls and Greatest Living American has certainly got the blogosphere buzzing. In three days, it has generated no less that half a dozen digg post, including one that got about 1500 diggs (thanks Cameron), at least a couple dozen links and huge outcry of loyal fans.

We are happy to report that while Google is still showing a little resistance, (along with very unstable results that change every hour) the Colbert Nation is already the top 10 for Greatest Living American. Yahoo, meanwhile, is cooperating nicely; it shows number 1 for giant brass balls and greatest living american is 3rd.

MSN and Ask are picking up related stories, but neither is showing our hero in the top 10 yet.

April 19th update.

Colbert Nation is now #1 for Greatest Living American in Google and was number #1 in Yahoo and MSN this morning, but appears to have dropped back. Still no progress with Gooogle for Giant Brass Balls, but #1 in Yahoo.

Given the tremendous response we have seen today and the fact that most of the rest of the top 10 is taken up by posts about the campaign, we should be able to fly the Mission Accomplished Banner by Saturday.

We want to thank everyone who participates in the Stephen Colbert Campaign, but we want to give a special thanks to those who have gone above and beyond with creativity and made us smile. While the idea may have started with Alchemist, it is the creativity that makes this fun.

Allan Dick for his America’s Claw Foot Tub, The Bacon Nation for Incredible Colbert and Todd Mallcoat, a New York SEO, for making me blush and for his suggestion to Google Bomb every political candidate in the 2008 race.

And of course, for Rand Fishkin. While he and mystery guest were late for the taping that night, he more than made up for it by announcing a Google Bombing Contest.

Anointing Stephen Colbert as the Greatest Living American.

Alchemist Media was in New York this week, presenting at the Search Engine Strategies conference. President Jessie Stricchiola spoke on the Ad Copy & Landing Page Clinic panel and moderated the Advanced Paid Listings Panel.

In between sessions and networking events, we got a chance to see a taping of The Colbert Report hosted by Stephen Colbert, who was introduced as the greatest living american. During the Q&A period before the show we asked Mr. Colbert if he ever considered using his loyal following to influence Google results. After being told that yes, he could reasonable achieve top ranking for almost any key phrase he chose by asking his fans to link to ColbertNation.com with the correct anchor text, Mr. Colbert said he would like to rank first on Google for Giant Brass Balls. Well—that just seemed way too easy, so we decided to do some thinking to find other words that the show should rank for…

A quick check on Google shows he doesn’t even rank for Truthiness, a word he invented. So, Colbert Nation, we are not -ahem- suggesting a Google Bombing campaign… but isn’t it time to start linking to the Greatest Living American?