After all, what good is a hit piece if it’s not easily discoverable on Google?

The goal of Grassroots SEO is to get as many undecided voters as possible to read the most damaging news article about the Republican candidate for Congress in their district. It is based on two simple premises:

1. One of the most common political activities people take online is to use search engines, mainly Google, to find information on candidates. (For more information, see the Pew Internet and American Life Project’s report on 2008 online political engagement.)

2. These results of these searches are always in flux based upon hyperlinks anyone posts anywhere on the Internet, including message board comments and social networking sites (but not email).

As a result of this, not only is it possible for us to use our hyperlinks to impact what people find when they search for information on candidates, but we would be foolish not to do so in a way that benefited our preferred candidates. We are already impacting search engine rankings whenever we post any hyperlink anywhere, so we need to make sure the way we use hyperlinks helps result in our preferred political outcomes.

Follow the link for assorted crafty tips in the dark art of googlebombing, including sticking to articles with damaging headlines in order to grab eyeballs and confining links to stories that come from mainstream news sources so that googlers are assured that they’re finding legitimate nonpartisan material. It’s an okay idea — a quick, cheap, easy form of delivering oppo research to undecideds as part of a GOTV effort — but it strikes me as something that’ll affect maybe one out of a thousand people who end up googling a candidate’s name. Most googlers will probably end up going directly to the candidate’s campaign website, which is bound to be the top search result, and get lost there. Even if the googlebomb works, the other top results on the main page are likely to involve high-profile negative stuff that’s already been vented repeatedly during the campaign in attack ads. That’s not to say it’s not worth doing — every vote counts, after all — but, much like “jobs created or saved,” there’s basically no hard metric by which to gauge whether the effort accomplished anything. DKos claims that the last googlebomb efforts in 2006 “reached” 700,000 voters in 50 key campaigns; if they reach that many this time and the GOP still picks up 60 seats, will the argument be that they … would have picked up 70 if not for the googlebombing?

Ace is working on a more bricks-and-mortar form of GOTV but we’ll have to wait for details on that until next week. Exit question: Assuming conservative media (Fox, talk radio, etc) picks up the googlebombing story next week, won’t the audience’s annoyance that Dems are encouraging Google-related sneakiness actually help fuel Republican turnout?