Google co-founder, Sergey Brin, has admitted the company’s decision to censor its search results to appease the Chinese government, damaged the public perception of the company.

Asked whether he regretted the decision, Mr Brin admitted yesterday: “On a business level, that decision to censor… was a net negative.”…Mr Brin said the company had suffered because of the damage to its reputation in the US and Europe.

Despite the negative response, Google doesn’t appear ready to back-track on its decision.

Co-founder Larry Page said: “We always consider what to do. But I don’t think we as a company should be making decisions based on too much perception.”

Page added that most of the negative reactions came from people reading headlines and not actually exploring the details of Google’s move.

Google has announced they’ve made some changes to their algorithm to try to identify and suppress the instances of Googlebombs (when many people link to the same page with the same keyword, in an attempt to get that page to rank for an obscure or insulting phrase).

By improving our analysis of the link structure of the web, Google has begun minimizing the impact of many Googlebombs. Now we will typically return commentary, discussions, and articles about the Googlebombs instead….the extra effort to find a good algorithm helps detect Googlebombs in many different languages.

Ok, that’s a great effort. No one really benefits from seeing a Googlebomb listed in the search results, but what does this do for your link building efforts?