George Bush is once again at the top of the Google search results for failure, ironically enough because of the administrations attempts on whitehouse.gov to point the finger at Congress for failure in Iraq.

Searchengineland.com describes how the administration went wrong: 

Remember how Google introduced a link bomb fix in January that, among other things, finally got US President George W. Bush out of first page of results for searches on miserable failure and failure at Google? Bush is back, at least for failure, and the White House has only itself to blame.

What happened? The White House used the word “failure” on Bush’s page, which resulted in the page becoming relevant for the query again. If the White House was smart, they’d have realized it can never ever ever ever use the words “miserable” or “failure” or both of them together without risking showing up in Google’s top results for searches on those words.

… Google’s never explained how its link bomb fix works. However, it’s widely assumed that Google looks for an unusually high number of links using certain words pointing at a page that doesn’t use those words. If lots of people link to a particular page at the White House site using the word “failure” in the anchor text — but the White House page itself doesn’t use that word — Google guesses there’s a link bomb happening and defuses it.

The same site has an amusing article on how Bush inadvertertantly or intentionally condemned all future presidents to the “miserable failure bomb”:

The Bush Administration almost certainly tried to alter Google results itself through a change it made to the White House web site in September 2006. It redirected the Bush bio page to a general page about all US presidents. As I wrote, that move would likely have condemned future US presidents to also be ranked for the term:

Why the change? My money is on the Bush Administration finally getting someone smart about search engines in to “solve” the miserable failure problem. The new page is a common page that potentially may be used by all US Presidents, rather than one specifically about George W. Bush. All those links making the old page come up will now make the overall page for ALL US Presidents rank well for that term.

SEO is becoming part of popular and political culture.