Dangers of 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?

What is Google Bowling?

Google Bowling' is a negative term coined to explain the exploit of getting a competitor banned or penalizedÊin Google search results. It all began with Google's aggressive attempts to curb link popularity manipulation by penalizing sites that purchase site-wide text link ads to get lots of incoming links in a hurry. (eg: If the ad selling site had 1,000 pages, the advertiser's link would instantly be on 1,000 pages.)

Google began filtering sites that indulged in this kind of linkage and either penalized or flat out removed the site from its database. Bad news for that business. Excellent news for their competition. Can you guess what's coming next? Some people have looked at this phenomenon and decided that if they go out and purchase these types of links to their competitor's sites, then their sites will disappear from the index, thereby boosting their own rankings. This is "Google Bowling". If you find yourself gone from Google, you may just have been Google Bowled by one of your competitors.

What the Future Holds

There has long been theories that Google would eventually create an over-optimization penalty for those link builders who overuse keywords in their link text, those theories have become a reality for a lot of webmasters in the past few months.Ê With this in mind many people also believe that Google would never impose such a penalty because it would open up the floodgates of competitors sabotaging each other.