OPEN

With all the high drama of a potential Republican meltdown at the US mid-term elections, you’d be forgiven for not noticing the sideshow battleground of search engine optimisation (SEO). But the New York Times has picked up on it though in a piece headlined: A New Campaign Tactic: Manipulating Google Data.

It reports on the activities of Chris Bowers “a contributor at MyDD.com (Direct Democracy), a liberal group blog”:

Fifty or so… 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.

He is also using sponsored results in Google to push the agenda of his preferred, Democrat, candidates.

The is some discussion in the piece of the ethics of this kind of approach, but I was struck by how little attention political campaign teams appeared to have been giving to what results come up in search engines for their names, their competitors and issues important to their campaign. It’s a failure on the part of their communicators to understand the search engine as a medium and how, as away of getting information, it is far more important than channel media, such as TV and newspapers.

It should be part of any communicator’s due diligence to check what comes up for their brand and related issues in Google & co and indeed to make sure they have positive, accurate information ranking  for their candidate.

As for optimising negative articles for opponents that has the ethical equivalency of of negative campaigning:  a great big grey area. Of course you are going to draw attention to remarks politicians made in the past, but attack ads (attack SEO?) can cal your own morals into question…