Goerge W. Bush Was Google Bombed?

If you ask any internet sales manager or director in the car business this one question, it is most likely they will say the same thing:

What is the single most important factor in optimizing a car dealer website?

Most will say keywords, Title Tags, etc… My answer has always been backlinks, and I finally have the evidence to prove it. But first, let me give you the most famous example that happened a while back.

During George W. Bush’s presidency a bunch of webmasters got together and linked to his biography website with the link text saying “miserable failure“. We call this a Google Bomb because what the link text says (anchor text) is one of the most important factors in optimizing any website.

What happened was simple. Anyone who searched Google for the term “miserable failure” was presented with the top 2 organic (free) listings pointing to the actual White House Website. The second listing went directly to George W’s biography page. So, was the official website of the White House optimized for the term “miserable failure”? Certainly not.

Google had to make some dramatic changes to it’s algorithm to keep this from happening in the future, and even Google’s Matt Cutts said the change was “completely algorithmic” and “we’re not going to claim it’s 100 percent perfect”.

After Google made this change a new tactic hit the world of SEO, and it was referred to as “Google Bowling“. To beat the competition, a rogue SEO company would bombard their competition with a massive amount of links from low quality websites pointing to a website. This would trigger a Google penalty that would kick them off their desired listings. This is why you never want to build too many links too fast.

Google did place a defensive mechanism in their algorithm to combat this. I know this because it happened to me. I put a shady alleged DMOZ editor in his place on a popular forum, and the next day he tried to Google Bowl me back when I was in the seafood industry. To my relief, it did not work. Thanks Google, good looking out!

Anyway, to prove how important backlinks are, I found a query I can use as an example. I was Googling the term “used cars in Orlando” this morning and I found a Ford dealer in Orlando Florida that came up on page 2 for this term.

Normally when you Google any term, you will see the keywords in bold in the website’s title tag and description. With Orlando Florida being one of the hottest used car areas in the United States, I was shocked to see that this was number 11:

This Google Search Didn't Even Have Any Keywords In It

If you notice, the words Orlando or Florida aren’t even mentioned in the display. If you Google that term, you will see websites with great keywords even on page 10.

This is an example of how powerful backlinks can be. There are many websites out there that will check your backlinks. I like Backlink Watch because it shows the bad links with the nofollow attribute.

You can click that term to learn more about nofollows, but basically any nofollow link will not pass relevancy to your website The same goes for javascript links (search engine bots don’t even try to read java scripts). If you plan on obtaining backlinks to your website, you should learn the difference.

A great website to check your current backlinks is Back Link Watch. You can also check your competition’s backlinks. Any backlink you find with the term “nofollow” next to it you should disregard.

For example, this particular dealer had many backlinks from yellowpages.com, but they are all nofollow. These backlinks won’t provide any SEO benefit to the dealers website.

There were some juicy backlinks from Netlook, an Orlando Used Car Listing Website, and some miscellaneous directories shown for this car dealer.

As an internet sales manager it is your job to acquire backlinks. There are thousands of directory websites out there that are free, and there are also some juicy paid directories like Business.com and the Yahoo Directory. Each of the two cost $300.00 a year, but you will get your moneys worth in Organic Traffic.

Keywords are still important, and I cannot believe that this dealer in Orlando doesn’t have any keywords in their title tag. I don’t blame them for being naive, so I would blame the vendor that built their website. The first thing they should have done was put the proper title tags on the homepage.

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If you have any suggestions for a topic, send an email to mike@showroomlogic.com.