Blogging and (Google) bombing for a good cause

As you may have heard by now, apparently an anti-semitic hate group known as Jew Watch comes up as the top result on a search for the word “Jew” at Google. A staff reporter at j. magazine called this to the attention of Google executives, who were indifferent to the situation.

How did it end up there? It’s not that popular a site… a Google PageRank of 5, and only 35 links are showing to it on Google. How, then, did it end up at the top? Apparently primarily due to internal linking—the categories on their site are all hyperlinked and contain the words “Jew” and “Jewish” extensively.

So, what can be done about it?

Here’s where blogging and Googlebombing come in. Googlebombing is the technique of getting numerous people to link to a particular site using a particular phrase, thereby affecting the Google rankings and moving that target site up to the top result for searches for that keyword. In the past, it has been used for various mischievous and political commentary efforts, such as making a search for weapons of mass destruction return a page that looked like a typical web “page not found” error, but instead actually said “weapons of mass destruction cannot be found”.

So now we have a tool to take action in light of Google’s refusal to do so. mobius, a poster at the Jewschool group blog, has launched a campaign to bump some more appropriate links for the word Jew up to the top of the list. In particular, he has chosen the Wikipedia entry for Jew as the target, “as it’s the most inclusive, non-denominational, and democratic source on the subject”.

So far, it’s working—the effort has moved the Wikipedia entry for Jew from relative obscurity on the second page up to #3 as of this writing.

If you’d like to do your part, just post the following code somewhere in your blog or website:

<a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jew”>Jew</a>

Of course, I took an extra step which I’m surprised no one had thought of before, and added it to the examples on Wikipedia’s Googlebomb entry!

via David Brake via Norman Geras