Googlebombing the Midterms: Dirty Trick or Netroots Citizen Activism?

[oberliner]

Interesting piece from Slate:

The November 12 New York Times noted that a familiar Internet prank had been elevated during the recent congressional midterm elections to a campaign tool. The Times called it "loaded links," but more typically the technique is called Googlebombing. The idea is to get lots of Web sites to use the same "anchor text" (i.e., the text you actually see in hyperlinks) to link to a particular Web page. Because of the peculiarities of Google's search algorithms, this raises the Google ranking of that Web page much higher than would otherwise be the case. The campaign application is obvious: create a pattern of links that will offer up negative commentary about a particular candidate to Google users. This variety of Googlebombing appears to be the first campaign dirty trick (practitioners prefer the term "netroots citizen activism") in many a year to be pioneered by Democrats.

http://www.slate.com/id/2154518/entry/0/