What did Google Inc., do to neutralize the Google Bomb? Are there any
penalities to websites creating off-topic links i.e. the type of links
that are created in a Google Bomb? Are there any research papers that
would provide an insight into the type of algorithm that may be used
to neutralize a Google Bomb?

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Request for Question Clarification by googleexpert-ga on 23 Mar 2003 21:40 PST

just curious,
have you checked out the following posts on this page?
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/8261.htm

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Clarification of Question by microdoc-ga on 23 Mar 2003 23:56 PST

Yes, I have read this, and have just read it again now. What seems to
be a difficulty with that I believe I have seen in a paper from
Stanford that narrows it down much more. I believe there is somewhere
a paper that talks about "off-topic" and "on-topic" links between
subgraphs of the entire webgraph. If I understand it right, Google
Inc., has implemented a means to stop the Google Bomb which does not
penalize the destination site of a link but does penalize the
originator of the link. I need to know whether this is the case or not
for an article I am writing.

Essentially I need to find out how the Google Bomb was stopped -- and
whether this has any implications for linking between subgraphs. I am
of the belief that using links that do not have words matching the
destination site are either worthless, or have some form of penalty to
the originating site.

microdoc-ga,

Thanks for the opportunity to answer this question -- it really IS a
good question.

First, some pretext on Google Bombing.  This site contains a
collection of links on the phenomenon.
http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/02/03-bomb.html

It sources from the original article in Microcontent news:
http://www.microcontentnews.com/articles/googlebombs.htm

"Adam Mathes identified a critical hole in Google's Algorithm in
April, 2001:
Adam identified a critical loophole in Google's algorithm. This
article I'm writing may be about Google Bombs... but if enough sites
linked to it using the phrase "Aunt Jemima," then this article might
come up as the first search result for "Aunt Jemima." In other words,
the linker can impact the Google Rank of the linkee."

Second, the algorithm changes:
http://www.googuide.com/optimization/algochange.htm

"Google has recently made changes to its ranking algorithms. There are
no official words from Google but it seems that the changes has been
made to fight two phenomena that worried Google:

1. Google bombing
2. selling advertising based on Google PageRank"

"So what has changed in Google ranking algorithms? There are some
hints:

To stop Google bombing, Google now seems to check link texts with the
link web site. If the link text doesn't appear in the linked site,
then the link is ignored or degraded.
 
To stop PageRank monetization, Google seems to put lower value to link
texts if the linked pages don't have a high PageRank."

You may also wish to check out the "Google Hacks" book recently
published by O'Reilly, ISBN 0596004478.  This book might contain
information on Google's algorithm separate from what I was able to
turn up.

The original paper on Google is here:
http://www-db.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

Here are some citations:
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/context/389098/0

Of particular interest is the PageRank Citation Ranking paper:
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/page98pagerank.html

Search methodology:
- Google searches on following terms:  pagerank, google bomb, content
ranking algorithms, citations, google paper, pagerank paper
- Personal knowledge

If I can offer any more assistance, please let me know!

Best of luck.
arimathea-ga