Ah, remember the days when politicians ran clean campaigns based only on issues? Me neither.
Add a new item to the long list of political shenanigans that backfire once discovered. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) has decided to run for Texas governor against incumbent Rick Perry, and her new campaign website contained hidden text that read “rick perry gay.”
[…]
Texas newspapers uncovered the hidden text last week. The “rick perry gay” reference was one of only thousands of phrases tucked into the source code for Hutchison’s site, apparently to help draw search engine traffic.Hutchison’s campaign initially told the Austin American-Statesman that “a vendor sold them on a tool that generates the phrases hourly or less in an attempt to divine the most frequent Web searches made by individuals who search online using one or all of the terms ‘Rick Perry,’ ‘Kay Bailey Hutchison’ and ‘Texas'”—and plenty of people search for “rick perry gay.”
The tool was allegedly used to help make banner ad buying decision, said the campaign, a claim that makes little sense on its face. Why would such a list be inserted in the website’s source code unless the goal was to draw search traffic to the site?
Whatever the reason for it, the Hutchison campaign blamed the vendor who developed the site and removed the Perry reference. On July 30, Google removed the campaign’s site from its search index as a penalty for using more than 2,000 hidden terms. Yahoo then followed suit.
I wonder what other dirty tricks politicians use on the Interwebitubes?
This is Texas.
Hunter S. Thompson used to tell a story in which Lyndon Johnson “told his manager to start a massive rumor campaign about his opponent’s lifelong habit of enjoying carnal knowledge of his own barnyard sows.” The campaign manager protested that nobody would believe that the guy’s a “pigfucker.”
“I know,” Johnson replied. “But let’s make the sonofabitch deny it.”
On a positive note Google and Yahoo have removed the site from their listings as punishment for salting the code. That is going to hurt.
It is also a sensible, measured reaction to the abuse. Sheet, can you imagine Alphie looking for his morning reading and end up at Hutchison’s site instead?
This is just too funny….
And we say government officials are not tech savvy!
Now what if all 2000 hidden terms were true? What if rick perry IS gay??
Why’s she running? She is popular in the state, but Rick Perry is the incumbent, one of the few who balanced his budget without raising taxes.
Politicians will use anything they can buy to win an election.
I wonder what other dirty tricks politicians use on the Interwebitubes?
LOL… Now that is the funniest thing I’ve read in a long time. .. Did you miss the last 14 years of Roves great creations shipped around.
Hutchinson must be tired of doing real work… the Texas governor has very little power. This is because of Reconstruction after the Civil War when they put Yankees in as governors. The state responded by moving most of the power to the Lt. Governor — that’s the office with the real power. The Governor’s job is mostly ceremonial.
Yes, southerners are still pissed about the War of Northern Aggression… charming.
Himmm. I wonder if anybody has tried pictures of naked women that flash by so fast the conscious mind doesn’t notice? It would tend to draw males back to the site.
They used to do that with food at the movies.
You know Texas politics has turned even farther to the right than usual when Kay Bailey Hutchison is the moderate candidate!
Sounds like SEO snake oil crap. (SEO = Search Engine Optimization) Web designers trying to game the search engines. Just Cheap crap. Fire the web people.