About a year ago, in fact SES London 2007 if I am not mistaken, there was a lot of fuss relating to “Google bombing” and that Google have over come the problem. The process of bombing is generating inbound links to a website that influences its ranking for a given search phrase. The classic was “miserable failure” (at George Bush) and “waffle” (at John Kerry).

Matt Cutts of Google discussed Google bombing in the keynote at SES. Despite his comments at the time it appeared that it wasn’t an automated algorithmic filtration, due to the fact that Adobe Acrobat still appeared at the top for “click here”.

Recent events surrounding the Church of Scientology and a group laying siege via a “Google bomb” has restored the debate on how the process can still be effective and draws significant verification, having reviewed the attack, to how SEO black hat can still get away with it.

Not that I’d endorse such activity, white hat is always the best policy, but shades of grey and where to draw the boundaries are always worth knowing in this game.

In short if I were to put in order what the main positive areas of SEO are they would be as follows: