When Politics Meet SEO. The Iranian Google Bomb
For all the political correctness that the Americans are known for, when it comes to international politics , Hollywood never hesitates to help Big Brother out. The latest scandal comes in box office friendly format and is called “300″. It depicts the “noble” Spartans fighting the barbarous “Persians” in the battle of Thermopile. Now of course nobody expects Hollywood to portray history accurately, coming from the country best known for Dracula I know that better than anyone, but this movie is regarded in the Middle East as typical propaganda, in the great tradition of “Black Hawk Down” and many other movies of this sort.
The Iranian government’s reaction was very specific to the countries of the region, it protested a lot but everybody ignored the protests. The Iranian diaspora (the Canadian and American ones more specifically) though took the battle further on the web. Hundreds of bloggers with Iranian origin have begun an effort to discredit the movie’s message by presenting a more accurate history. How are they going to do that? A good old fashioned Google bomb. If you don’t already know, a Google bomb is the process of linking with the same anchor text (which consists of the keyword phrase aimed) to a single website by many people. It always has a political purpose or a humorous one.
The Google bomb itself will point to this site and the anchor text aimed is “300 the movie”. At the time of writing, for this particular keyphrase the site was on 14th position, but the project has just started. Anyway this will prove to be quite an interesting twist to online activism and it will be interesting to see if this idea takes off.
Very nice article. It’s going to be really interesting to see how this will turn out!