Daily Kos: How to Hurt Republicans on the Web

The left-wing website Daily Kos has launched a campaign to have readers dig up negative articles on Republican candidates and help maximize their exposure on Internet search engines.

The Daily Kos article by Chris Bowers says it is a “grassroots-based search engine optimization campaign, which I call Grassroots SEO for short.

“The goal of Grassroots SEO is to get as many undecided voters as possible to read the most damaging news articles about the Republican candidate for Congress in their district.

“As a result of this, not only is it possible for us to use our hyperlinks to impact what people find then they search for information on candidates, but we would be foolish not to do so in a way that benefitted our preferred candidates.”

The mechanism behind the campaign: By increasing traffic to an article, readers will push the story higher on search engines and make it more likely a Web surfer will access it.

Daily Kos targets what it calls the 98 most competitive House campaigns and offers tips on finding the most suitable articles. These stories should have a title that is “damaging in and of itself,” includes the “candidate’s name in its title,” comes from a well-known news source, has the name of the candidate in its URL, and preferably is short and recent.

“When you find an article, post its headline and URL either in the comments” or send it via e-mail to the address for the Daily Kos campaign.

“Once we get the articles we can start working to push them up search engine rankings,” Bowers writes.

“We need to launch the campaign early next week, so let’s gather these articles as quickly as we can.”