Two years ago today, Google launched an algorithm to defuse Googlebombs. It basically helped remove the miserable failure results at Google, amongst others. In May of 2007, we learned that the Googlebomb algorithm was not a live algorithm, meaning, it was run manually, as often as Google wanted.

Now, in Detecting Googlebombs by Googler, Matt Cutts, we learn there are two parts to the algorithm. Matt explains the first algorithm finds these Googlebombs and then lessens their impact in the Google search results. The second algorithm goes through the entire Google index to locate more of the detected Googlebombs and defuse those. Here is how Matt put it:

The short answer is that we do two different things — both of them algorithmic — to handle Googlebombs: detect Googlebombs and then mitigate their impact. The second algorithm (mitigating the impact of Googlebombs) is always running in our productionized systems. The first algorithm (detecting Googlebombs) has to process our entire web index, so in most typical cases we tend not to run that algorithm every single time we crawl new web data.

Matt explains that the "mitigating the impact of Googlebombs" is run all the time but the detection of Googlebombs is run every now and then and in 2008, they ran it "5-6 times."

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and at Sphinn.

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