IP Democracy: Google-Bombing the Elections

I’m a little late to this, but Chris Bowers at MyDD has mounted a campaign (which is either genius or crazy) to get liberal bloggers to link to negative press articles regarding Republican candidates, all in an effort to boost the Google rankings of these articles when users search on the candidates names. This “Google-bombing” is an effort to game Google’s system, which is based on links, to put the bad news about the Republican candidates’ first.

Here’s what Bowers recommends: any time a blogger refers to one of a list of targeted Republican candidates, say Jim Talent of Missouri, a link should be embedded in the candidate’s name which jumps to a negative press article, from a reputable news source, preferably local. Here’s the article for Talent.

But the Google-bomb effort is going even farther than that — Bowers recommends that bloggers add the source code for the links to their templates, which theoretically could increase the number of links, and therefore the Google ranking, geometrically.

It’s too soon to tell if this effort achieves any results, but it’s an intriguing, and slightly disturbing, negative campaign tactic. Moreover, it’s not clear if Google-bombing works, particularly for well-known candidates.

But it is far from clear whether this particular campaign will be successful. Much depends on the extent of political discussion already tied to a particular candidate’s name.

It will be harder to manipulate results for searches of the name of a candidate who has already been widely covered in the news and widely discussed in the blogosphere, because so many links and so many pages already refer to that particular name. Search results on lesser-known candidates, with a smaller body of references and links, may be easier to change.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on October 27, 2006 2:52 PM to IP Democracy