another Google online organizing strategy

[colist at comm-org.utoledo.edu]

[ed:  Thanks to Daniel for the day brightener and strategy insight.]

From: daniel at artcardshop.com

Hi folks,

Remember searching for "Weapons of mass destruction" with Google? 
(it still works)  

Well, this time, I suggest you search for 'miserable failure'. Do it without 
the quotes, and you can hit "I'm feeling lucky"- this automatically 
forwards you to Google's top result.  

Like the WMD example, this is not about Google's founders being witty 
or subversive, but it is proof positive that the words you link with do 
matter. A while ago, someone started a campaign asking people to link 
to http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html with the words 
"miserable failure". As a result, the algorithm used by Google computes 
that this must be the most important page on the topic. If you agree, you 
too should put up a similar link on your page ;)  

While this is all much fun, we can learn from this to help build a better 
web presence for our causes. If, for example, there is a good article on 
public-private partnerships on one of your favorite organizations' 
websites, you could link to that page, with "public-private partnership" 
as the words for the link. This is much more effective than just a link to 
their homepage using their name: chances are, people googling their 
name will find them, but their topic pages are buried.  

The Google Pagerank algorithm has some unfortunate side-effects. 
Links from "important" pages are believed to mean your site matters. 
Since a lot of sites writing about Iraq link to the CIA's "World Factbook", 
it is the first site that comes up when you do a search for Iraq. We could 
of course advertise on Google to give our sites more attention (and at 
about $.10/hit, it's cheaper than a lot of mail-outs!), but we really do 
need to pay attention to where we link, and what words we use to do 
so.  

Have fun spreading the word about Dubya's miserable failure :)  

-Daniel.

PS: feel free to forward this email far and wide if you find it useful.
PPS: I'd appreciate links to my website (artcardshop.com) with the 
words "greeting cards". Thanks! ;)