Negative Linking Your Political Opponent

One online ‘dirty trick’ that is perfectly acceptable is to link to outside content about your opponent using the opponent’s name as the link text.

For example:

<a href=”https://www.localnewspaper.com/article/ councilman-caught-doing-something-wrong”>Councilman Bob Jones</a>

This type of targeted linking helps ensure that when someone looks up your opponent’s name, certain content may appear in the search results.

Make sure the page you link to is real, preferably from a reliable source like a newspaper, rather than some obscure blog. You don’t want to be accused of promoting bad information if what you link to later turns out to be false.

You also want to link to your targeted source from other places, particularly from social media. Ask you followers to like or retweet your posts to multiply the linking effect.

This technique works best against targets that do not have much of a web presence. If you are trying to have a negative article rank for someone’s name, Google will need to see the article as more important than a person’s website, social media accounts and other related information about them. That can be tough.

Repetition is important and this technique works better when multiple links come from a variety of sources. The more people that link something, the better. This can your campaign website, other websites, blogs, social media accounts and so on.

While ‘Google Bombing’ is pretty much a thing of the past, particularly after the technique was used against a former president, it can still work on a smaller scale.

In fact, we pulled a variation of this trick back in 2003. The work on that local campaign led us to create Online Candidate.

There’s no guarantee this technique will always get results. Your mileage may vary. Either way, you never want to pass up an opportunity to nail an opponent online.

For more online strategies, visit our exclusive companion site, OnlineCandidateResources.com.

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