Comments on: Homework Assignment: Google “Barack Obama Muslim”

By: Spinning the Web: Manchurian Candidate Edition : Tree of Knowledge

Spinning the Web: Manchurian Candidate Edition : Tree of Knowledge — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 12:16:44 +0000

[...] to the dead horse that is this site’s obsession with shaping new media coverage of politics, e.politics has an interesting account of what looks like some interesting online media management by the Obama [...]

By: Jon Garfunkel

Jon Garfunkel — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 22:37:10 +0000

That’s not quite GoogleBombing. What was novel about the original googlebomb (”miserable failure” -> biography of George W. Bush) was that the target page didn’t have the search terms in the text. Google changed their algorithm in January 2007. So an industrious group of bloggers could try this again with president lies or other combinations of words on that page.

It’s often easier to do SEO than people think. If you have a fairly uncommon target phrase, and want a page to rise above other links to it, 3 targeted links to send it to the top of Google. For example, take the words Homework Assignment Russo. This page is ranked 3 & 4 in Google today.

What Kos wanted to do was a targeted SEO operation. But it still didn’t overcome snopes (the SEO ranking of which we presume was more organic.) Google still reports no PageRank value for barackobama.com, but gives snopes.com a 6/10.

And, lame or not, targeted SEO of barack obama communist does affect the Google results. For that matter, so does john mccain communist. But these are likely searched much less than the first example.

By: links for 2008-04-23 « andrew golis

links for 2008-04-23 « andrew golis — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 23:52:58 +0000

[...] e.politics: online advocacy tools & tactics » Homework Assignment: Google “Barack Obama Musli… Did the Obama campaign quietly help coordinate a proBama google bomb to kill smears? (tags: obama google new.politics new.media 08) [...]