(Google) Bombing the Presidents

Well Google may have diffused that bomb, but looks like bing.com are more than happy to keep it locked and loaded. Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land pointed out that for some reason the "miserable failure" bomb seems to be live and well (or is that lit and fused?) in recent times.

Google run their algorithms from time to time to locate and diffuse these bombs, but what of the other engines? Yahoo! never seemed to really get rid of it entirely and MSN was pretty much on the same path. At present a search for "miserable failure" on Ask.com reveals George Bush to be the number one contender while surprisingly his right hand man is now Barack Obama (does Ask know something we don't?). Okay, so there is more to this than meets the eye.

The White House implemented 301 redirects a little while ago to send most of that failure link-love back to its intended destination (that of past President GW Bush). It seems that Google have managed to once again find and block this bomb. MSN (now combined with Live as Bing.com) seem to have re-indexed the site and are now reporting the GW Bush bio as a "miserable failure", followed by the Wikipedia report on this event and surprisingly the new (and only one that I know of) bio for B Obama. Yahoo!'s results match those of Ask.com (although they have indexed the new URL). Interestingly enough Ask.com still list the old gwbbio.html file as the URL for GW Bush despite the site having implemented 301 redirects (clicking on the link takes you to /georgewbush/).

Okay, so what does this really tell us? That GW Bush and Obama are miserable failures? Well, that will forever remain a long debate.

From an observation point I'd say that this would suggest that the miserable failures in this case are the search engines. Agreed, they may simply be returning facts based on what the public perceive, however this simply goes to prove how easily these giants can be manipulated to this day.

Google seem to have worked around this one and I have a sneaky suspicion that when Matt Cutts moved from the domain www.mattcutts.com to www.dullest.com he was testing just how well they handle the 301. Perhaps Obama and Bush both owe Matt and his team a thanks on that one. On the other side of this we can gather that most of the search engines still need to work on how they deal with 301's.

Could this leave a door open to spammers to "Google bomb" a page, then simply 301 the link love to another page?

Moving a Home / Website

I've been in the process of packing up to move for the last few weeks. Personally I hate moving I've done it so many times and it's rarely, if ever, an easy exercise. This got me thinking. Moving home and moving a website are both equally difficult or cumbersome at best.

Depending on the move you plan, you may have to pack everything up and transport it to a new location. When moving home you need to make sure that all your furniture and other valuables are safely stored for easy transport. When moving a site you'd need to make sure that you've backed up your site correctly (with a second backup just in case) so that you can easily load it to a new server.

Then there's the unpacking stage. Is your new home big enough for all your furniture? Will you struggle to fit all of your furniture into the rooms? Are there more rooms that will allow growth - if that is your desired plan? In much the same way, assuming that you don't simply have flat static HTML files, does your new host support the language that your site has been written in? Do you have any server specific scripts that will need additional server support, or would you have to rewrite a few scripts (mail scripts tend to be the bane of my life on this one).

Usually when moving location specific information about you will change. Details such as your mailing address, home phone number and actual physical address will change. When moving a website this also holds true. While many details will remain the same, do you plan to update the website? Possibly change URL structure? Or even the programming language of your website? If so this will leave the older pages lost in cyber space. If your domain name has changed, and you still own the old domain name, redirect traffic to the relevant page on your new site. If you've kept the old domain but have decided to change the URL structure, redirect the old pages to the relevant new one - in much the same way that you would do for your snail-mail postage.

As you would (and should) let authorities, banks and others that need to be able to find you by updating your personal info, let the search bots find your new pages and domain by alerting them to the move. This will speed up an re-indexing that will need to take place as well as preserve any link strength that you may have earned so far.