First there was linking President Bush with the words “miserable failure” on Google. Then last year Rick Santorum fell victim to another Google hack. This week it is Mitt Romney and the escapades of his long-distance car journey with his dog strapped on his car’s roof that has gotten the Internets in a twist. Try Googling (or Binging) just Romney and look carefully at the results, you will see one link that is out of place. Sorry, we aren’t going to show it here.
The best analysis to date of the situation was posted by Danny Sullivan at SearchEngine Land here. What I particularly like is how he goes into some depth as to figuring out why this particular link has risen so quickly to the first page of search results, “for a site that appears to have started around January 12.” Using Majestic Site Explorer, last week he found that the site had more than 200 links from 67 unique sites. Today it is up to 250 links from 77 sites. It certainly helped when the site in question was mentioned on the Rachel Maddow show, and the current press reports in the past week have also put it back on the map.
Some people have called this anti-Romney page a “Google bomb” which isn’t accurate, since the page actually mentions the word Romney. And unlike the anti-Santorum page created by columnist Dan Savage,which was a site with some depth about criticisms of the candidate, the anti-Romney site is just a single page with minimal text.
