Notice anything? How about the Google Sitelinks (if you wanted to know what those are called) above the search form? Notice which two “senators” are listed? That’s right: the two senators who left the greatest deliberative body in the blah blah blah voluntarily to take better jobs almost a month and a half ago.

What’s going on here? Well, Google is kind of a black box, so my guess is as good as anyone’s (although probably less than this guy’s) but I’d wager their no longer-extant pages got much more traffic in the days leading up to their assumption of offices in the executive branch — and that nobody else’s has yet garnered enough traffic to supersede them. Just a theory though. If anybody has a chance, maybe it will be Senator almost-elect Franken.

   

This has resulted in some serious discussion at Techmeme, as it should be, but my question is: What took so long? I covered the launch of Huffington Post when I was writing the Blogometer at National Journal’s Hotline two and a half years ago, and kept a close eye on the development of the site. If you recall, the site was the subject of some some scrutiny and fun-making ahead of its launch. Huffington’s venture survived the early gibes, long enough at least to attract new ones.

Maybe six months in, I noticed that headlines on the front page linked to just the kind of pages now being critcized. I never wrote about it, but I did bring it up to my boss, who also thought it strange. While Moser has stumbled across a particularly egregulous example of the practice — and in fairness, HuffPo’s Jonah Peretti claims it was an editing mistake — they’re already pushing the envelope of what’s acceptable. And in this case, I think even Sam Zell would have a point.

Bloggers are frequently given to quoting long stretches of others’ writing, but as fair use guidelines usually require, they do so for purposes of adding commentary. HuffPo does not, which raises the question of how much Huffington Post is an authentic blog and how much it is a media company appropriating others’ credibility.

Also raising this question is the new book, The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging. Here’s the cover, available from Simon & Schuster:

Notice anything? Like, say, a complete lack of original blogging voices? Craig Newmark is the lone individual whose reputation was first made online, and even then his rep is not as a blogger but as the founder of Craigslist. Huffington Post built some credibility over the past few years, with myself and other informed consumers of news, by giving a bigger soapbox to lesser known talents such as Jason Linkins and Lee Stranahan. I’d say HuffPo has done them a lot of good, and they would say the same.

But then there are those like Walt Moser and Monica Kendrick, the author of the review noted above. In both circumstances, HuffPo falls short of being a democratizing force in the media. In the dichotomy between its famous and non-famous contributors, HuffPo is trying to have it both ways: they will elevate new writers, but only so far. And the same is true of its bid to provide a new way of experiencing the news: sometimes, all that means is appropriating yours.

The last time I wrote about comment spam was in April, when I received maybe five to ten such submissions per week. In the final months of 2008 that number is up to something like five to ten per day. There’s no good reason why this should be — as you may have noticed, the second half of the year has been observably less bloggy than the first, and notwithstanding a few spiky links from big traffic-drivers, the daily visitor count has been at best unpromising. So why the surge?

My guess is that unsophisticated pliers of the trade have become a little more sophisticated, and so must be trying — and failing — more often and in greater numbers. I don’t think these are the Russo-Turkic schemers akin to Jonathan Franzen’s Gitanas Misevicius. Much of that, I believe, now defaults to spam filters.

Instead, these comments make it all the way to the moderation queue and seem to come from native English-speakers who have a website to promote, know a little bit about how search engines work, and aim to elevate the PageRank of their meager obsessions (or unwitting clients) in the sections of a blog they found on Google or Technorati. My blog, in fact.

And sometimes they come back. Earlier today, an algorithmic process denied a now-deleted comment access to my latest post, about the Phillips Foundation’s Journalism Fellowship Program. It went something like:

Grants to become a journalist, what’s next, grants to become a lawyer?

Not exactly a constructive comment, but snarky enough to wave through… except for the business e-mail account and URL of said business pasted into the address field. And the business? A Welsh company selling organic meat (a tautology, if you ask me) on the open Interwebs.

I hadn’t even noticed it until I received an angry e-mail from the bon mot’s possessive owner, someone whom I’d wager fits the above description. In the interests of unusually equal amusement, here’s the e-mail exchange in full:

In retrospect, I believe he was genuinely confused by the phrase “SEO strategy” — after all, if he wasn’t, he probably wouldn’t have left a comment in the first place.

P.S. And to my erstwhile correspondent: If you leave a comment this time, what the heck: I’ll give you one free non-piscatory fish out of the Akismet spam filter.

Update: In case you’re wondering, “I love reading Blog P.I. because…” is the default opening line if you start from the Contact page. And speaking of defaults, I wish WordPress wouldn’t promise that the “blog admin … will be able to restore it immediately.” I’ll decide when I’m able to restore it.

N.B. The title is a reference to DeLillo’s Most Photographed Barn in America. Beyond the explicit nod to “The Corrections”, I count at least three more literary references that I swear were not premeditated.

Regrettably, I was born with no mouth.

He was very understanding, writing back the next day:

thank you sir thank for your mail all is understood well i can question you just of the condition you gave any please kindly make a way we can both talk

At least I think he understood. In any case, this is the long way around getting to my real point.

As you may know, I run a blog here. As you can probably guess, I get my share of spam comments; most are caught by the Akismet plug-in for WordPress. But then, most are fully automated and advertise prescription drugs, gambling websites or sex acts that would probably boost my unique visitor counts if I mentioned them, but I don’t need that kind of traffic.

However, a small percentage of it manages to evade Akismet’s filters and find its way into my moderation queue. In some cases, they are only barely distinguishable from real comments. In some cases not listed here, I’ve approved comments that I am sure were intended only to improve the SEO of the website linked, but were interesting enough to allow through on their own merits.

Most are not, but this doesn’t mean they’re entirely without value. Some of them are clever, some are just amusing. I’ve been holding onto a few of them to discuss here, so let’s open up the queue, if for no other reason than now I can finally delete them:

Here, somebody is pushing what appears to be a YouTube clone, even using a joking nickname YouTube acquired once the site itself was acquired by Google. In fact, the site turns out to be a combination of Google’s input forms. Though the IP address indeed traces back to the United Kingdom, the author is not especially concerned with proper English spelling or punctuation. They also have no system for keeping track of which websites they have already hit, or they just don’t care. I’m leaning toward the latter.

Here is one that, at first glance, looks like a genuine comment: This was intended for a post that mentioned Ron Paul, just as the one above tried attaching itself to a post discussing Google and YouTube. But if you follow the link, it goes to a blog whose posts consist of only of one YouTube video and sometimes-relevant text copied from other websites — “scraped” as it’s called. And there’s a good reason why it sounds like a real comment: It was scraped from another comment from the same thread.

This one promotes yet another inscrutable blog, this time in a foreign language that I presume to be Turkish. I guess this because the IP address resolves to Izmir, Turkey. The one above resolves to Istanbul, Turkey. The two cities are not close by, so they are probably not the same person. But if Turkey is a hotbed of comment spam, that’s news to me.

Undoubtedly, this one is my favorite. Like the Wikipedia vandal whose edit summary consisted of “Blanked the page” or the panhandler who admits he needs the money for booze, “Sohbet” is admirably honest about his intentions. I might even consider throwing him a link, except that the website no longer exists — less than a month after he was trying to extract Google juice/build traffic for it. Also of note: the IP address resolves to Antalya, Turkey. Still, if Turkish comment spam is a known phenomenon, I can’t find any discussion about it.

Funny at first, but tedious. I get a lot of these, and it’s kind of similar to another common tactic I’ll get to in just a bit. Flattery will get you everywhere with some people, but not me. Also, the linked site is in Russian. Russian spam at least I am familiar with.

Better than YouTube! Quite a claim. Surprisingly, the website is well-designed, coherent and legitimate. For someone who just wanted to find videos related to a presidential or prospective VP candidate, it might actually be better than YouTube. So here we can start to draw a clear distinction: Some spam comment campaigns aim to promote fake websites that seek ad revenue or to promote another website. Others are spammy promotions for real websites; it’s very possible the creators of this website don’t know exactly what their SEO is up to. But I’m not particularly offended by this comment. It doesn’t add to the conversation so I won’t approve it, but it got the general subject matter of this website correct, it’s vaguely conversational, and it doesn’t represent itself as anything other than what it is: a pitch.

Lastly, this one I’m including not because it’s compelling, but because it’s so common. Also, because it represents the dishonest counterpoint to the previous example. Here, the commenter announces enthusiasm for the targeted website (in this case mine), then immediately starts pitching another website. Notice that his subject matter is completely off-base with what Blog P.I. is about. The targeted post — which I wrote in July, 2006 — included exactly one use of the word “wedding,” in a throwaway reference to New York Times announcements page thereof.

Predictably, the website being promoted is commercial in nature, but doesn’t offer anything for sale itself. What it does, though, is link to pages on a real wedding supply website, which presumably hired the spammer to boost their search engine ranking. A bit of rudimentary sleuthing reveals the SEO’s identity and company; he’s using his real name (which is something, I guess) and he didn’t even register the URL anonymously.

But I’m not going to single him out with a link or textual mention that could turn up in a search engine. He’s not doing anything illegal and, as noted above, similar practices are exceedingly common. I’ve been a critic of certain SEO practices, but I’m fascinated by also them, and clearly I think some tactics are better than others. The way I see it, if you’re going to do black hat SEO, why not do it with some style?

Also, the joke is on them: Every link in my comment section is automatically assigned a nofollow attribute.

I’m sure that on more than one occasion over the past decade, Larry Page and Sergey Brin have wished they’d never committed their company to such a nebulous goal. After all, who gets to decide what’s “evil”? Sure, Google has an extensive corporate conduct policy which aims to do just that.
But the real problem is, you’ve just invited everyone to start looking for ways in which you might be, in their eyes, “evil.”

Page and Brin probably never imagined that Harper’s Magazine — once influential on policy and culture but now self-marginalized on the far left — would one day deem them evil for leaving their computers on all night. But maybe they should have, because a new feature in the magazine’s latest edition does pretty much that.

The tech blogosphere paid this article some attention over the holiday weekend, but none of those tracked by Techmeme bothered to scrutinize the article. But Ian Spencer, a friend and fellow former editor of the Oregon Commentator, has.

What follows is a letter he sent to Harper’s. As we figure it will never grace the pages of Harper’s letters page — let alone Google’s search results — he has allowed me to print here:

In light of Ginger Strand’s “Keyword: Evil” article in March 2008 I find it interesting that harpers.org contains code directing a user’s web browser to communicate with Google’s servers every time they visit a page on your site. This service is called Google Analytics, and it enables Harper’s management to easily view site traffic patterns. The supposed costs of “the cloud” must carry less weight than the benefits of website visitor statistics, at least for Harper’s. And if Ms. Strand and Harper’s would like to reduce Google’s electricity usage, they could always tell Google (and other search spiders) to not index their web pages.

There were also a few inaccurate and deceptive statements in the piece. For example, Google’s servers use standard techniques like caching and indexing to reduce the overhead of a single query to just a few megabytes worth of data, not “petabytes” as claimed by Ms. Strand. And the ominous-sounding “tens of billions of CPU cycles” used to process said data is by no means excessive. After all, a computer processor faster than one gigahertz goes through more than ten billion cycles every ten seconds. If you’ve read “Keyword: Evil” on harpers.org you’ve probably used more electricity than Google’s server does when you search for “journalistic integrity.”

But I expect inaccuracies when reading about computers in a non-technical magazine. Far more troubling is the notion that Google is evil simply because they use a lot of electricity. There are plenty of important issues to criticize them on: they have horrible privacy policies and censor users in China, for example. But attacking them for providing an energy-consuming service which Harper’s itself uses was, well, unexpected.

I would just like to add: “Keyword: Evil”? Really? No wonder Harper’s is so antagonistic toward today’s Internet — they’re still on AOL dial-up.

OpenLeft’s Chris Bowers is back with an update on his latest Googlebombing campaign, this time directed at Rudy Giuliani. Bowers is claiming that because of his and other liberal bloggers’ efforts, two of his targets — an article claiming that Rudy is worse than Bush, and a letter from NYC firefighters to Hizzoner — are now among the top ten Google search results for “Rudy Giuliani.” Is this tactic a method of search-engine optimization (SEO) or gaming the system? William Beutler, who writes Blog P.I. and works for the Fred Thompson campaign, thinks it’s the latter. “It’s not making the pages better, it’s not doing the organic things that Google is supposed to do,” Beutler told the National Review.

Ironically, most of the links in the original didn’t work — if it had been a Google bomb, it would have been a dud. But I digress already. I do appreciate the shout-out, and it’s inspired me to comment on Google bombing and SEO in a little more depth than I could for National Review. And because Chris Bowers seems particularly aggrieved by the comments I made in that article, perhaps this will clarify things.

First and foremost, what Bowers calls “search engine optimization” isn’t, quite. A webmaster implements SEO techniques to make a page he controls rank prominently in search engines, primarily on industry-leading Google. If you’re doing it “white hat,” this means knowing what Google’s bots will and will not respond well to, and acting accordingly. This is not “gaming the system” — this is just playing the game. Bowers and his allies have no control over the pages they would like to see place higher in the rankings, so what they’re doing instead is optimizing the search engine for their pages, rather than their pages for the search engine. There’s no getting around the fact that this is “black hat” SEO. I don’t suppose Bowers particularly cares. His goal is to win elections, and if that makes him an unethical SEO, so be it.

From a technical standpoint, Google bombing is pretty much the same thing as link farming. All that differentiates them is the leftroots are farming with mules, while black hat professionals are using heavy machinery. Bowers still has to push the mules, while the pros merely start up the combines and turn them loose.

If Bowers & co. were in fact doing this with bots, it would be a clear case of fraud — if Google catches you using automated link farms, your site or page may be delisted entirely. But because they are doing it with crowds of like-minded individuals, the practice is technically legit. Bowers could argue, even compellingly, that their linking patterns are just as legitimate as any other. But the coordination is the difference. Google’s results are supposed to be the revealed preference of millions of unconnected individuals. Yet Bowers has replaced Larry and Sergei’s invisible hand with his own, pushing the mule along.

I’ll stop before I mix any more metaphors, but let me add, I blush at the idea of Google trying to “defuse” these “bombs.” Once Google gets into the business of deciding what is organic and what is not, they’ve got a) a Miller v. California dilemma on their hands, and b) too much work because of it. But I have no authority over search engine results, so I will say that I know this one when I see it: The practice of selecting a single critical story from all the coverage about a political candidate and linking it over and over and over to make it more prominent than it would be otherwise is far from organic.

As long as there remains a benefit (or perceived benefit) to Google bombing, amateur politicos will keep it in their toolbox. Unless Google sets up a Gmail account to collect bombing complaints, there’s no way to stop them from doing it. So, as I argued earlier in the year, the only way to counter negative Google bombing is with positive or reverse Google bombing.

P.S. The question still remains, how effective is Google bombing? Here are two quotes, one from the NR story, the other from a Bowers post. Here’s Drew Ryun, son of ex-Rep. Jim Ryun:

When a campaign goes wrong and a five-term incumbent loses, there are a whole lot of things that have gone wrong. So was the Google bombing the sole reason we lost? No. Was it a part of it? Yes, but how big a part I don’t know.

And here’s Bowers, in reply:

Hahahahahaha! Yeah, of course the Googlebomb campaign hurt Jim Ryan’s re-election chances.

Well, I already knew what Bowers thought. But the fact remains, nobody can really tell how influential the practice is. But per my comments in NR, I submit that if you can get a negative link in the top three results for a politician’s name, then you have an effective Google bomb. And you’ll know this one when you see it — because you’ll be guaranteed of actually seeing it.

Once Stephen Colbert signs off, and I’m not supposed to be asleep, I’ll usually click over to “The Tonight Show.” Sorry, Dave, but it’s mostly because Conan follows on NBC (the headline is supposed to be a reference to your line from Cabin Boy, though the wording is more like a Dan the Automator album).

Jay Leno’s “found on eBay” segment* is his most Conanesque skit, down to the big reveal — whether the ridiculous item on the block (tassel hats for house pets, a penny for $10, etc.) found a bidder. It’s a simple game, not dissimilar from Colbert adding comments to Amazon and iTunes, and anyone can play along at home. In fact, I’ve been playing all week.

On Tuesday, Mickey Kaus posted a brief (arguably immigration-related) item pointing toward the auction page (#170121848086) for twenty-six John McCain-related domain names:

Fire Sale? McCain domain names, on sale cheap (so far) on E-Bay. … [Tks. to reader M.W.] 7:22 P.M.

$150 for the lot, not an unreasonable estimate of worth and certainly lower than many premium domain names change hands for. And hey, there’s even “free” shipping (i.e. e-mailing some passwords)!

And yet, no bids. Here’s what the page looked like as of Thursday night:

During the week I checked in to see how the bidding was going — or wasn’t — down to the final seconds (I said I was watching closely) at “14:51:26 PDT” or 5:51 p.m. EDT:

But would an eBay sniper emerge at the last moment, from the McCain camp or possibly a rival, to secure the lot with a single bid?

Nope. Apparently cheap isn’t what it used to be.

Despite being linked by Kaus, the counter on the page only recorded ~740 views by the end of bidding — dozens of them being yours truly. According to eBay policy, the seller can post it again once more free of charge, so a second round may be attempted.

If so, it will probably be at a lower price point. But even $150 for 26 domains surely represents a net loss for the seller. (The price per domain works out to $5.75, but an individual buyer isn’t going to get initial registration that cheap.) It’s clear this domain hoarder was bailing on the investment: McCain’s moment seems to be over and the owner was trying to cut his losses. But his timing was off, not just his pricing.

And to be fair to the McCain campaign, they have no use for the domains. They already have JohnMcCain.com, for one thing. And the McCain Internet team is unlikely to borrow a slogan that makes no sense from someone who doesn’t put McCain’s interests first.

These domains are all parked courtesy of GoDaddy, so they aren’t causing the campaign any trouble. The seller doesn’t sound interested in launching an anti-McCain network, but even if he did, the domain alone wouldn’t make it a hit. The other three GOP frontrunners have each inspired anonymous oppositional blogs — shady, personality-free repositories of oppo material that go mostly unlinked and must be found via search. I haven’t seen one for McCain, but if one did materialize, it wouldn’t be among the campaign’s top concerns.

To don my Captain Obvious cap (temporarily removing my P.I. shades), having the perfect domain name contributes nothing to sustaining reader interest and confers no intrinsic value. Several of the most popular political blogs started on or still operate on a blogspot.com subdomain.

The usefulness or danger of an independent McCain-themed website is not determined by domain, but content. Type-in traffic is neat but miniscule. Search traffic is worth more, but won’t build an audience. Still the best path to large and sustained volumes of traffic is by being interesting and getting bigger websites to link it.

These domains may be SEO optimal, but they sure sound canned.

Bonus: Full list of 26 domains that nobody wants, with analysis, excerpts of the sales copy — and a resolution to that dangling asterisk — after the jump.

*Alas, no video. NBC gets its content pulled from YouTube when it wants to, and it wants to.

You here? Good. So, how blindly desperate does this promotional copy sound to you?

Thank you for visiting this exceptional auction. As you all know, John McCain is a Republican front-runner for the 2008 Republican Nomination, and in many polls, he is the favored winner of the 2008 Presidential Election. His distinguished service, both as a veteren [sic] and as a Senator from the State of Arizona, has placed him as a natural choice for Commander in Chief.

McCain is the man to watch, and McCain is the new LEADER of the Republican Party.

Nobody will dispute that McCain has served his country honorably and has legitimate foreign policy experience. But he’s not new, and nobody thinks he is the favored candidate right now.

What is up for auction today is TWENTY-SIX PREMIUM John McCain domain names. …

“ChooseMcCain.Com” and “2008McCainPresident.Com” (which has all the key words in one domain) are valued at over $20,000 each! I don’t know what the exact value of ALL the domains together is, but I guarantee you that they are only going to increase in value as we get closer and closer to the 2008 Presidential Election.

$20,000, eh? Then why wasn’t the asking price $40,000+? And you have to love the passive oice on “are valued.”

To be fair to the seller, the domains are are all .coms, which is a pretty good considering the proliferation of lesser-domains being registered — so this certainly demonstrates foresight.

Judgment, not so much:

• McCainScandal.Com sounds like good CYA, but what do you do with McCainBacon.Com? Isn’t his occasional anti-pork crusade at least something his supporters and opponents would like? Why not McCainPork.Com?
• Then there’s McCainAndAbel.Com and McCainAndAble.Com. Why would you search for McCain and Abel? And what’s to be profited by redirecting visitors to another site? Wouldn’t that be kind of a cheap trick?

And finally, if you’re still reading, the domains themselves:

• 2008McCainPresident.Com
• AmericaLovesMcCain.Com
• ChooseMcCain.Com
• GopMcCain.Com
• ILoveMcCain.Com
• JohnAndRudy08.Com
• MarinesForMcCain.Com
• McCainAndAbel.Com
• McCainAndAble.Com
• McCainBacon.Com
• McCainCan.Com
• McCainForMe.Com
• McCainForSecurity.Com
• McCainGop.Com
• McCainHistory.Com
• McCainInIowa.Com
• McCainIowa.Com
• McCainMania.Com
• McCainPrimaries.Com
• McCainScandal.Com
• McCainTheMan.Com
• McCainTrain.Com
• MilitaryForMcCain.Com
• USAMcCain.Com
• USSMcCain.Com
• WeLoveMcCain.Com

Considering that there is a lag before Google’s index will be updated, it’s likely prudent to start the 2008 Presidential Gooblebomb once the Republican nominee is known.

I wonder if an early round targeted at all the candidates (except maybe Ron Paul should link to sites what emphasize his opposition to the war) wouldn’t be of value. The only downside to starting early is that it gives the other side more time to respond.

An advantage of an early start is that Google may be getting tired of having their algorithm gamed and reduce the influence of a sudden spike of links. In this case, starting early would be an advantage.

As a defensive measure, we should reverse good Googlebomb the Democratic nominee with links to official and favorable websites once the Democratic nominee is known.

These are questions the underdog online Republican activists should be asking themselves as well. The Google wars rage on, and as every strategist knows, fighting the last campaign is rarely enough.

The Chief is correct about Google’s displeasure with overt efforts to “optimize” its search engine: Google bombs for “miserable failure” (George W. Bush), “waffles” (John Kerry) and “greatest living American” (Stephen Colbert) have all been defused, though news coverage of each remains.

So a gradual effort would make sense. But which sites do you choose? Will the strategic decisions of mid-2007 hold up in late 2008? Might Google step in and make an editorial judgment again anyway?

That’s why I’m intrigued by the reverse-Google bomb; not only is a preventive strategy wise, I presume the Oracle of Mountain View is unlikely to step in and demote a positive website — so the chances of the effort being wasted are much lower. Even if one goes the negative route, it still makes sense to match search terms with a website that actually contains those terms. The aforementioned trio of Google bombs were easy to identify because they were so obviously contrived. That said, an ongoing effort to associate John McCain’s name with negative coverage appears to be failing, at least so far.

Websites to avoid include the candidate’s Wikipedia entry and official site, which are already likely to be near the top. News stories are also risky, as a news organization could move the location of a particular story at any time, for any reason, without warning.

So what kind of site should the positive-bombers select? Here’s an idea: The participants should set up a brand new advocacy blog for that candidate, to which they can link the candidate’s name when blogging at their own sites. Not only will the new entry rise to the top, but if the blog is well-maintained, it will generate multiple entries that will rise to the top of the results as well.

Most SEO guides advise that the best recipe for success is to create content that people want to click on, link to and read. That should apply here, too. Don’t muck up the results — create the results you want people to find.

The Google wars probably will never end. But this is one way to neutralize the damage.