Democrats Plan to Google Bomb the Elections
October 26th, 2006
Written By: Adam Sussman
This is a must read! Chris Bowers of MyDD Direct Democracy has requested for readers of his site to copy a list he created of Republican politician’s names which link to sources of scandal and misdealing and have them post it all over the web!
What does this mean; the Democrat’s have gotten crafty! It’s a tactic Search Engine Marketers call Google Bombing. As has been done in the past against President Bush to appear number one in Google for the term Miserable Failure, many links were created by as many people as possible which linked to the White House using that term as part of Hyperlink (anchor text).
Well this is not the first time Chris Bowers has attempted to manipulate those who are using Google to gather more informative information before hitting the voting booth.
Chris writes to his readers
Maybe I don’t have the manners to be a good online citizen–it doesn’t matter. If Democrats win this election, and search engine optimization plays any role, I will feel good about doing this. And no one called right-wing bloggers “unscrupulous” when they did this to John Kerry in 2004. They opened the Pandora’s Box on this one, and they can ram their criticisms for me taking it up a notch upward and to the left.
He even offers his reader a how-to guide with all the code one needs to participate in this political Google Bomb.
In a separate diary, I have added the plain text format of the Google Bomb. All you need to do on your blog is to copy and past what you see there. You don’t have to do it everyday. You don’t even have to do it more than once (but feel free). All you need to do is copy and paste the code from the diary on your blog. When you discuss any of these races in the future, please, use the same embedded hyperlink when reprinting the Republican’s name. Then, I suppose, we will see what happens.
Every campaign should be engaged in search engine optimization on their own. They can find out more on how to do just that by checking out the New Politics Institute, and their excellent “new tools” campaign. They even have an article on using search engines. If this got some press to teach campaigns that they need to focus on this in 2008, then all the better.
The right-wingers over at HotAir are not to happy about this as some are saying Google should sue Chris Bowers for attempting to manipulate their results (ShandyKing pauses for a second to reflect on this).
Undecided Voter X wants to know about Bob Corker and Harold Ford, GOP and Dem candidates for the Senate from Tennessee respectively, and so Voter X Googles the two men. If Bowers’ scheme works, Voter X won’t get unbiased results. She’ll get negative articles about Corker, which might tip her to vote for Ford. And Google’s product will have been rendered defective.
Ricardo Reyes, a spokesman for Google says
We don’t condone the practice of Google bombing, or any other action that seeks to affect the integrity of our search results. A site’s ranking in Google’s search results is automatically determined by computer algorithms using thousands of factors to calculate a page’s relevance to a given query.
To get the complete story
1: Google Bomb The Elections: Lets Do This My DD
2: Google Bomb The Elections: Pump Up The Volume MyDD
3: MyDD’s Googlenuke Campaign HotAir
4: Google Should Sue Chris Bowers HotAir
5: A New Campaign Tactic: Manipulating Google Data NY Times
For those who think I am playing favorites with my outbound links, all the links in this story contain NO-FOLLOW. That means there is no link love coming from this blog to any of the sites I posted above!
October 26th, 2006 21:25
My guess is that they are a day late and a dollar short to pull this off effectively. With only a couple of weeks to election time, how much of an impact will this make? Will the pages they want to pull even have the time to do it? I’m guessing not.