That is not the end of the story though. As I discovered, "google spamming" is just a subset of search engine spamming that is not specific to Google (and of course, the spammers would tell you they are engaging in SEO - search engine optimization). I found one good explanation of this at the Jump Start Search site, where they have a page that explains:

Search Engine Spam is the use of unethical techniques for improving the position of a web site in a search engine. In order to manipulate their position in a search engine, some web site owners use spamming (unethical techniques) and thereby try to fool the search engines.

• Content spam - includes things like invisible text(by making the text color the same as the background color) and keyword stuffing (keywords in small font at the bottom of a page);
• Meta spam - includes the use of unrelated keywords and the use of keywords in hidden html tags;
• identical pages
• "code swapping"
• redirects
• and link farms.

Google bombing
The next term to look at was not as elusive as "google spamming", although I was not familiar with it. Fortunately, "Googlebomb" has a Wikipedia entry (you get the same result searching for "google bombing") that explains it:

A Google bomb or Google wash is an attempt to influence the ranking of a given site in results returned by the Google search engine. Due to the way that Google's PageRank algorithm works, a website will be ranked higher if the sites that link to that page all use consistent anchor text.

The Wikipedia entry goes on to explain:

A common means of exploiting this is through weblogs, where although the entry may disappear from the main page quickly, the short-term effects of a link can dramatically affect the ranking of a given site. Empirical results indicate that it does not take a large number of websites to achieve a Googlebomb. The effect has been achieved with only a handful of dedicated weblogs.

The above statement has to be qualified, however. A handful of blog links will not Google bomb someone like Amazon out of the top results for "books," for example. In fact, Googlebombs have generally had an impact on relatively "non-competitive" terms, where there's no particular page that seems to be necessarily the right answer.

If we look back at that last comment from the Wikipedia though, we see that Googlebombs seem to be aimed more at getting certain pages to show up based on more obscure searchs. Remember earlier I noted that Google spamming is intended to get sites to show up based on searches of common or popular search phrases - Googlebombs appear to be the other end of the spectrum, getting sites to show up based on searches of uncommon or unpopular search phrases.

Once again, I'm a bit befuddled as to how Mr. Merkey thinks he (or more properly one of his sites) has been Googlebombed. To be a "Googlebomb", there would have to be links created on many different sites using the same text with the hyperlinks all pointing to the same site. I'm not aware of any site Mr. Merkey operates that has been around for a long time (long enough for anyone to spread links around the Internet pointing to it) nor am I aware of any calls for consistent use of a specific phrase or text to point to such a site if one did exist.

I did decide to do a little experiment and tried various search phrases with Google, like "peyote", "peyote smoker", "Cherokee peyote", and "SCO employee". None of the results containing "peyote" returned anything involving Merkey (at least not within the first 3-4 pages - I didn't go further as anything deeper doesn't really seem to qualify as a "Googlebomb" or "Google spamming"). Both ip-wars and Groklaw(an old page from the radio.weblogs days) showed up in the results for "SCO employee", though none of those results pointed to anything about Mr. Merkey (hehe - and www.welovethescoinformationminister.org showed up as well).

Tacking on "Merkey" to "SCO employee" brings up several results, most of which are due to Merkey's lawsuit. Discounting those, the only results are from Merkey's own posts or coverage of his lawsuit from several years ago. If anything, it would appear that Merkey has created a pseudo-Googlebomb (I say "pseudo" since the text on these sites are not anchor text as part of any hyperlinks) pointing to ip-wars, Groklaw, LWN, and even slashdot based on the search words "SCO employee Merkey". Similar results were achieved doing a search on the words "kill" and "Merkey" - everything that popped up relating the two are sites covering his lawsuit. You have to dig deeper to find the infamous "killfile" comments from Perens. So once again, it appears that he has actually created the pseudo-Googlebomb pointing to the sites he complains about by the action of filing his lawsuit.

Google hacking
Finally, I did a quick search on the term "Google hacking". Although Merkey does not use this specific term, he does make reference to "hacking" and search engines. As I discovered, "Google hacking" actually refers to the use of Google to discover vulnerabilities in web sites or to discover information that people didn't want found (ironically, one would assume you would engage in "Google hacking" to try to find the hidden pages and such that are used by the "Google spamming" folks). The number one search result on "Google hacking" on Google itself turns up johny.ihackstuff.com a site that maintains the Google Hacking Database. I also found the Google Hack Honeypot which has been set up to work with the GHDB to try to track the techniques used by Google hackers so you can in turn strengthen your own site.

So this is obviously not what Merkey was referring to. I just thought it was very interesting

Summary
So there you have it. A brief explanation of what "Google spamming" and "Google bombing" are. These were new terms to me and it was interesting learning more about them. Hopefully nobody else out there was as in the dark as me about these terms (at least Robin Bloor was though), but if you were I hope this helps.