For people who hasn't heard yet about the term "googlebombing", its a technique where a lot of people would link to a certain webpage using a common word or phrase. This term is usually used to denote an SEO prank using legitimate SEO technique.

One very popular example is the "miserable failure" keyword. If you search for this keyword in google or yahoo, you will see that the biography of george bush ranks #1. If you check out that webpage, you can't even see the word "miserable" or the word "failure" in it. So how come it ranked #1? Thousands of webpages are linked to that specific webpage using "miserable failure" as the anchor text.

The big question, does googlebombing still has an effect this 2006? The fact that George Bush still ranks #1 using that keyword tell us that the answer is a resounding "YES it still has an effect!".

On-page optimization is like saying to the world "this is what I am". Off-page optimization is like saying "this is what the world sees you". With the emergence of irrelevant results in the search engines some years back, major search engines rely more about how others sees you because you can always fake what you say you are.

This is why meta tags and excessive keyword stuffing does not work anymore. Before it used to be that even if your keyword density is greater than 10% you can get away with it.

It does not mean however, that on-page optimization does not work anymore. It still plays a vital role in SEO.