RWN Makes MSNBC’s “Clicked” Again

17 Dec, 2004 by John Hawkins

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My What Could Be More Funny Than Going On A Republican Killing Spree? post about the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point teacher who joked about killing Republicans caught the eye of Will at MSNBC’s Clicked, but not for the obvious reason….

“Political extremists find recreation in pointing out how outrageous and offense their counterparts can be, and I generally try to avoid those battles. That said, this entry is an interesting example of what might be called search sabotage. We’ve seen Google bombing campaigns, and we’ve seen amusement over what search terms return what results, but I think this is the first time I’ve seen a site predict its own impact on another site’s search results.”

Here are the passages from the post that he’s referring to…

“But, you know what’s going to be really funny? Right Wing News is a pretty good sized website and I’m sure there will be more than a few links to this post. Fast forward a month or two and when people do a search for the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, you know like Republican Alumni who are thinking about donating or Republican parents who are wondering where to send their kids, this post should be fairly close to the top.

That means those Republicans will learn that members of the faculty publicly joke about murdering people like them and that’s apparently A-OK at UWSP! Personally, I expect that some of those folks may consider another school or place to send their money, perhaps one where the teachers don’t consider America to be a “pitiufl deluded sh*thol of a country”. Now that’s my idea of funny…”

Although I won’t be able to give you any real details (for obvious reasons), I can tell you why I was thinking about that when I wrote the post. To make a long story short, I got a call from someone who was trying to get a government job in DC and it was getting hosed up because of something I wrote on RWN (and it wasn’t even a negative post) that was showing up as the #1 listing for their name on Google. So in order to help them out, I actually yanked the post so it could be taken off of Google.

In these days and times when so many people research things on Google, getting torqued on a blog can actually be a big deal. Sure, it may be that only a few thousand people (if that, depending on the size of the blog) will read the original post. But, from then on, for YEARS and YEARS, customers specifically searching for information about your product or service may run across what that blogger had to say and it will influence their decisions.

In this case, Google’s spiders are still crawling around the web because this is such a new story, but already, 10 pages deep, you already find…

“Random Thoughts From Marybeth: University of Wisconsin-Stevens …… December 16, 2004. University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. (Link via Right Wing News). If a high school student wrote something about …
www.findercreations.us/ randomthoughts/archives/000595.html – 11k – Dec 16, 2004 -“

Blogs might not have the sheer number of readers that the MSM has, but the things we write can still make more of a difference than people might think at first…