As SEO's We Can Learn from Mitt Romney's 'Completely Wrong' Google Bomb

Posted by ImageWorks Creative Team October 11, 2012

If you Google 'completely wrong' right now, and search under the ‘images’ category, you will find an array of Mitt Romney photo's. Why? It’s all about how the Google search algorithm works – so read the rest of this article to find out.

What's the definition of Query Deserving Freshness (QDF)? Matt Cutts, the head of Google's Webspam team and a regular commentator on search engine optimization, talks about it in his webmaster help video located here.

QDF's refer to search terms where the "freshness factor" is taken into place and into account when Google returns a set of search engine results pages (SERPs). There are a lot of safe guards that Google uses to prevent spam, or people, from simply updating blog posts and pages regularly to make them seem "fresher." And you also have to remember that not every single query is a QDF.

So one might think that Google has a predetermined set of QDF's, or something of the sort of a database or a catalog - but that is not the case. It seems, at least in the wake of the latest Romney Google problem, that the QDF's are solely dependent on the titles of the popular news articles - and maybe perhaps a little bit of who is linking to these news articles and the anchor texts of these links.

Anyways, if more than one of these upper echelon news websites has the same keyword term in the same sequence, and if these news articles seem to be getting tons of links then it’s safe to say that Google is going to warrant that term as a QDF, and any of the images that are included within the article are going to come along with that QDF.

Notice anything about the Titles in These Articles?

They all have 'Completely Wrong' in the Title, and all of them have links pointing to the page - many of which have '47 percent' in the anchor text. In fact if you Google "47 percent" you will also find more Mitt Romney Pictures. You will also find Obama images for "had a bad night." It seems the whole image search query is populated by these upper echelon news articles...

So what does this mean? As people that are in the search engine optimization business, it means that we can learn a lot from the action of these news websites - websites like CNN and ABC. There is a lot of link equity and traffic to be earned from dominating trending topics, especially if you can find a way to get it to relate to your niche. All sorts of links, high rankings in the search engines, and new followers can start to happen overnight or over a weekend. That being said, sticking with evergreen content is also a good idea as well.

And perhaps, with this knowledge, there is also a lot of traffic to be gained from Google Images. Although they might be doing a little bit of tweaking after that one.

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