Google Declares Stephen Colbert As Greatest Living American

It’s official. Stephen Colbert is the Greatest Living American, or at least
now ranks tops for that phrase at Google. It’s all come from the latest
Google bombing campaign sparked off in part by Stephen himself. The backstory on
this, plus the "I thought Google bombing didn’t work anymore" angle, all
below.

Last week at the SES NY conference, I missed getting to see the Colbert
Report because, sadly, moderating the Robots.txt Summit meant I wouldn’t get
there in time. Someone, anyone, score me tickets next time!

Jonah Stein from Alchemist Media DID go and apparently raised the issue of
Google-bombing during the audience Q&A with Mr. Colbert (out of respect, I use
the Mr. honorific. So say we all). What would Mr. Colbert like to rank for?

Giant Brass Balls.

Sure, Jonah thought — but why not also truthiness and most important,
Greatest Living American,

he wrote at the Alchemist Blog.

Search Engine Watch
spread the
news. The SEOmoz

spread it further, complete with more detailed instructions and a bribe.

Today, we spotted News.com
noting he was now
ranking for the term. Congrats, Mr. Colbert. We salute you.

OK, specifically looking at first page of search results:

greatest
living american ranks the Colbert Nation’s
home page tops on Google (fourth
on

Yahoo, a
letter from Stephen third on

Live.com and
Ask
gives him no respect)
giant brass
balls ranks the Colbert Nation’s
Balls For Kidz
page tops on Google (zilch
on Yahoo, tops on

Live.com and
Ask again
gives him nothing)
truthiness ranks a
Comedy Central

clip of him on that topic at seventh (zilch
on Yahoo,
zilch on Live.com and Ask puts

his page at Comedy Central at seventh).

I’ll drill deep on the most important phrase, Greatest Living American. Both
Jonah and Rand told people to link to the “Letter From Stephen” page
here, like
this:

Greatest
Living American

But it’s not that page which is ranking on Google. It’s the home page. And
that brings us to the entire wasn’t Google bombing killed thing?

The change Google
made back in January was designed to stop pages ranking for terms if a
lot of people linked to them using those terms but the pages themselves didn’t use
the words. Everyone want to call George W. Bush a miserable failure? His page no
longer ranks for that since the page itself doesn’t use those words. OK, so it
did just rank again
recently, due to the White House using one of them. But the word is gone now
– and the page has dropped back down in the rankings.

The Colbert Report’s home page uses NONE of the words (because Stephen, who is
modest, has no need to declare himself the greatest). Here’s Google confirming
that the site ranks for that term solely based on links to it:

See the part at the bottom: "These terms only appear in links pointing to
this page: greatest living american."

So what’s the deal? Wasn’t the Google fix supposed to prevent this exact
thing?

Yes, actually. Of course, we’ve had a few exceptions cited, such
click here ranking
things like Adobe and Apple downloads. Maybe Google’s
Matt Cutts will come along to shed some
more light on the situation. I suspect the answer will be that the link bomb fix
Google uses is more sophisticated than just looking to see if the words people
are using in links, when a lot of links suddenly point at a page, actually
appear on a page.

In other news, Vintage Tub offers Stephen
a bathtub: