The impact of SEO on politics has yet to be really felt, but Chris Bower from Open Left is following the Electronic Grass Roots strategy I wrote about a year ago with his Google Bombing John McCain initiative.

Using the best practices of repuation management, Chris has chosen articles from established media outlets and is attempting to drive links to these articles with targeted anchor text.  Since the articles are keyword rich, on target and focused, they are highly relevant to the phrases.  Since the anchor text Chris suggests are taken from the article titles, it is very difficult for the engines to differentiate between "legitimate, editorial endorsements" and the kind of manipulation.

The only red flag for the engines will be that most bloggers will go ahead and link to all nine articles from one location instead of taking the time to create individual posts to support each topic/position they are trying to Google Bomb.

For example, one social commentary blog posted all of the links from a single story, although the author did at least take the time to change up the anchor text and add some more commentary.

Here are nine positions by John McCain that shows his true political allegence.  He is not a Maverick or an Independent, he has sold his soul to the Neo-Con Right Wing to get the nomination.

(1) John McCain Filibusters Minimum Wage Hike accuses the Democrats of class warfare — While adding to the war on the poor.

(2) McCain The Hypocrite economic policy shaped by lobbyist, just like every other republican agenda item. Bought and sold by Corporate America

(3) Bush, McCain On Social Security : Shredding the safety net. John McCain doesn’t need Social Security - He has two government pensions and married an heiress. .

(4) McCain Defends Nafta : It makes it so much easier to get export jobs when you create a special tax free zone and give corporations refunds for sending your jobs over seas. John McCain is a man of the people — Who make over $250,000 a year.

(5) McCain On Irag : Keep Troops in Iraq for "A Hundred Years".

(6) McCain Supports Bush Veto : Deny kids health insurance expansion.

(7) McCain Opposes GI Benefits: : He already got a government funded college education, why should our troops expect the same.

(8) McCain Opposed Choice: He supports individual rights of corporations, but not women’s rights to control their own body.

(9) McCain Defends Bush’s Iraq Policy : The biggest disaster in 225 years of American Foreign Policy and John McCain, the man running on his experience, supports Bush’s Policies.

I will be speaking on June 4th at SMX advanced on SEO Analytics. Analytics Every SEO Needs To Know - It’s more than just rankings and traffic reports to measure the health of SEO efforts. This session focuses on analytics that SEOs should be considering.

Not surprisingly, I will initially focus on ROI for ecommerce sites, particularly the importance of configuring your internal systems to capture Lifetime Customer Value within your CRM system instead of leaving it to 3rd party tagging software.

I will also talk about Crawl frequency and index inclusion as well as some of the data hidden in Google Webmaster Central.

Does anyone have a metric you find useful that you are willing to give up or a tool that you recommend? All contributions will be duly credited.

Google has been displaying local results for queries that contains a local component for some time now. A common query like san francisco restaurant displays 10 local search results along with a map. We now expect this type of local targeting because the query contains a geographic component which Google interprets as a geographic data.

Many search pundits have been calling recent changes in SERPs another Google dance. Evidence suggests that Google may be adding geographic information about brick and mortar stores and service companies to the algorithm along with reverse IP lookup to help boost site rank for regular results. Take the query engagement ring . I conducted this query in San Francisco and Los Angeles and got very different results.

Here is the same query in San Francisco.

Just to be sure I wasn’t seeing results from different data centers, I went ahead and queried multiple date centers using the SeoLog.com Datacenter Ranking Tool and discovered that the results didn’t match the LA results or the San Francisco results. In fact, some sites significantly better in both San Francisco and Los Angeles than they show on any of the data centers using the SEOLog tool.

We know Google been collecting service area information from webmasters from webmaster central. We know that they have extensive data from Google maps and third party vendors about where businesses are located. It makes sense that Google would add relevance to a website that represent a brick and mortar or service that is nearby. It appears they are starting to do so.

IndexTools announced today that they have been acquired by Yahoo. IndexTools has been one of my favorite Analytics applications since last years Analytics Shootout. Not only did they show the best results of all the tools we studied, they were also among the easiest to configure and offered a robust range of custom reports.

What I love the most about IndexTools is that they are able to collect all of the data a site owner needs from the beginning, so adding additional metrics to your reports only required small changes in the report instead of starting the implementation process again.

No word yet on whether Yahoo! will be offering IndexTools free to site owners to compete with Google Analytics, but if they do I will be among the first to sign my clients up, because IndexTools flat out rocks!

What’s the difference between great link bait and spam?

Complaints to Google from sites you outrank seems to be the most important factor. Consider the two widgets below. The first sites ranks #1 for "online dating" while the second has been banned by Google for using spammy, off topic widgets after Google received some complaints about them. The second site has essentially been smoted from the index.

OK Cupid

Your Score: Read Minds

We’ve discovered your super power! Hope you like it…

You’re a psychic and you can read minds! But please don’t read my mind right now, because I’m imagining you naked. Of course, you’re probably already used to people doing that. Ah, the joys of being a psychic. At least you’ll always ace interviews and pass your college exams with no problems.

JustSayHi

81%How Addicted to Apple Are You?

Free Online Dating

In fairness to Google, the folks at JustSayHi did stray into the dark side. After they ranked number 1 for most dating terms, they started promoting other domains with their widgets. They crossed the line with Google’s TOS. On the other hand, after a couple of failed re-inclusions, they decided to start over with a new domain and rebuild an entirely white hat site at One Plus You using the same quiz widgets. It turns out that Google considers the One Plus You quiz results widgets to be Spammy and Off Topic when they include the anchor text of "Free Online Dating".
The challenge for marketers is to know where to draw the line between very effective link bait and spammy, off topic link bait. As long as the algorithm rewards targeted anchor text, marketers will continue to find a way to get people to link to them using preferred anchor text.