Google Bowling

Google Bowling is a term which has become quite popular in the search engine optimization world. Google bombing refers to building different web pages/web sites that point to a specific website, to give its ranking a boost, but recently another term, namely ‘Google Bowling’ is making waves. So what is Google Bowling? Is it some kind of a new Bowling game introduced by Google? Or is it some kind of new software?


Google Bowling is a negative term, which refers to a technique that can be used to undermine your competitors by actually linking to their web sites using appropriate anchor text. As the definition suggests it is not something an ethical online business would do. But what makes it interesting is the fact that according to Google this cannot be done.


Quote from Google’s information for webmasters guide:
“Fiction: A competitor can ruin a site's ranking somehow or have another site removed from Google's index.

Fact: There is almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. Your rank and your inclusion are dependent on factors under your control as a webmaster, including content choices and site design.”


Before going into this concept further, it would help to clarify the fact that the concept of Google Bowling is still not proven, and something which SEO experts are still observing.


So how does it work?
Most SEO experts know that Search Engine Optimization is largely about link building. Google not only takes the quantity of links, but also its quality into consideration, before ranking a page, which means having a lot of bad quality backlinks could hurt your ranking. So let’s assume Person A wants to Google Bowl Person B, what he could try doing is, have poor quality links point to Person B’s website. The focus would be on having a large number of bad quality links point to Person B’s website, therefore, “A” can go out and buy site-wide links on huge websites, preferably more than 5 to 10 and those with 10,000 plus pages, with befitting anchor text, preferably something for which Person B already ranks well, or an exceedingly used commercial phrase. The most important thing here is that the anchor text remains the same on all web sites. Leaving it in place for a long enough period, preferably three or four months, should do the job.


This can be an extremely dangerous and powerful technique and something for which Google must have already started looking for workarounds. There might well be a time, when people will actually ring up SEO companies, requesting them to throw out competitors website’s from Google’s index rather than work on their own ranking.


With more and more people getting to know about this new technique it is vital for webmasters to protect themselves from becoming a victim of this. One of the most important things you should do to make sure that you don’t become a victim of this technique is check your backlinks often and change your anchor text from time to time.

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Article by SEOAssistance.com.
Google Bowling Article © SEOAssistance.com

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