Blogger launches 'Google bomb' at McCain

Blogger launches 'Google bomb' at McCain
Effort aims to boost Google rankings of negative news stories about Sen. John McCain
By Heather Havenstein


June 19, 2008 (Computerworld) A political blogger is using a technique known as "Google bombing" to enlist the aid of fellow partisan bloggers to boost the search engine rankings of nine news stories that reflect poorly on Republican presidential candidate John McCain.

Chris Bowers, managing editor of the progressive blog OpenLeft, is launching the Google bombs by encouraging bloggers to embed Web links to the nine news stories about McCain in their blogs, which helps raise their ranking in Google search results. Bowers is reprising a similar Google bombing effort he undertook in 2006 against 52 different congressional candidates.

The articles Bowers is using range from a story about McCain voting to filibuster a minimum wage hike to an item about the Senate passing an expanded GI bill despite opposition from McCain. Between June 6 and Tuesday, the first story had risen eight slots in Google's rankings to the 42nd result returned on searches for "John McCain." The second story is up 16 slots during the same 11-day period to the 35th result in a search for "John McCain."

The McCain campaign didn't respond to a request for comment on Bowers' project.

Bowers is aiming by Labor Day to have three of the nine articles appear in the top 10 search results for "John McCain" and "McCain," three in results 11 through 20 and three more in 21 through 30. When he began his quest three weeks ago, none of the articles were in the top 100 search results for either keyword search, he noted. Now, all nine are in the top 60 for "John McCain" searches and eight are in the top 60 for searches of "McCain."

Bowers said that he is operating independently and is not affiliated with the campaign of Democratic candidate Barack Obama.

more...

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9101218&intsrc=news_ts_head

...the freeps seem too lazy to go more than one page down though.