A new type of campaign in America...Google Bombing.

Link

If things go as planned for liberal bloggers in the next few weeks, searching Google for “Jon Kyl,” the Republican senator from Arizona now running for re-election, will produce high among the returns a link to an April 13 article from The Phoenix New Times, an alternative weekly.

Mr. Kyl “has spent his time in Washington kowtowing to the Bush administration and the radical right,” the article suggests, “very often to the detriment of Arizonans.”

Searching Google for “Peter King,” the Republican congressman from Long Island, would bring up a link to a Newsday article headlined “King Endorses Ethnic Profiling.”

Fifty or so other Republican candidates have also been made targets in a sophisticated “Google bombing” campaign intended to game the search engine’s ranking algorithms. By flooding the Web with references to the candidates and repeatedly cross-linking to specific articles and sites on the Web, it is possible to take advantage of Google’s formula and force those articles to the top of the list of search results.

The project was originally aimed at 70 Republican candidates but was scaled back to roughly 50 because Chris Bowers, who conceived it, thought some of the negative articles too partisan.

The articles to be used “had to come from news sources that would be widely trusted in the given district,” said Mr. Bowers, a contributor at MyDD.com (Direct Democracy), a liberal group blog. “We wanted actual news reports so it would be clear that we weren’t making anything up.”

Wow...a new type of tactic in hopes of defeating the Republicans. Can they just use the simple method of presenting the people as to what the liberals' views and how those views would help America instead of going through this?

What in the world makes you think that only democrats are doing this? Both sides are completely underhanded when it comes to campaigning.

Your article mentions peter king. Peter King sent out a directed mailing to jewish voters in his district claiming that his democratic opponent was accepting money from violent muslim terrorists who hate jews and that he himself is a terrorist sympathizer.

King neglected to mention that he accepted even more money from the same people.



SO WHAT if people are google bombing to highlight news articles. I am sure that the republicans will start doing the same, and perhaps even google bombing torwards completely fake websites that just slander their oppenets without cause.

My question is, how do you accomplish this? If I google Senator John Smith, how do you get the engine to list out pointers to negative news stories? Do you pay google oodles of cash to sort this way?

Google Bomb
Because of the way that Google's algorithm works, a page will be ranked higher if the sites that link to that page use consistent anchor text. A Google bomb is created if a large number of sites link to the page in this manner.

Anchor Text
Anchor text is the visible text in a hyperlink

An example, cited on that page:
www.google.com...

Search for 'failure' and you get the white house biography of the president.

I am not sure what happens when the next person is president. Bascially what they've done is make is so that 'failure' is the displayed text to the link "http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/". I suppose that whoever the next president is, so long as the page url stays the same, the biography on the president will come up. THe White House could alter the url of the page, make it "/president_bio" or something.

Also notice that google is aware that they are being googled bombed, and that the top most link is an explanation of this.
googleblog.blogspot.com...

Thanks Nygdan. Very informative. I always thought it was the direct number of hits that put a page at the top of the list. Factoring in sites that link to a term nows explains it.

Delta,

The Dems tried being honest and dealing with the policies for the last few elections whilst on the other hand the GOP perfected the strategy of slanderous attacks on all and sundry.

So please forgive them if the Dems try a third way, "Truthful attacks".

Cheers

S396