Why all these Google searches for I hate George Bush?

Every day there are a couple of Google and Yahoo! searches for the phrase ”i hate george bush” showing up in my search engine referrals pages. It’s not very surprising that those who perform this search end up here, since both Google and (Google driven) Yahoo! places one of my t-shirt pages, titled ”I still hate George Bush”, in the first position, and the same page is listed on top when searching on Yahoo! I’m somewhat flattered by the positioning, but I must admit that I have been wondering why anyone might do such a search. Could it be a possy of right wing christian fundamentalists coming after me, or the CIA?

Today, I think I found out why. The probable cause is an article by Joshua Rey, a British blogger with quite an interesting site. His excellent article is titled ”Why we hate George”. His article contains this passage:

It’s no exaggeration to say that George Bush is more widely and deeply hated in Britain and the Western World than Saddam Hussein is. And that’s even though Saddam has home advantage, as it were, in that he’s a fit object for hatred by both sides. If you punch up ”I hate George Bush” on your favourite search engine you’ll get a good deal more links than with ”I hate Saddam Hussein”. And you’ll also notice that a lot of the Saddam links are to articles about George Bush saying ”I hate…”

None of the links from Joshua’s article puts this site in a noticable position. So people must have done the search on their own, and forgetting the surrounding quotes from the article or editing them out deliberately to see what happens they have instead reached my page. At least that is what I hope has happened.

Since Joshua wrote his article Google has spidered his site, and placed it as number 2 and 4 in the two suggested searches above. But why is my I still hate George Bush page on top? There are several reasons, and here follows a few free SEO tips:

  1. The page has the words in the search string in the page title (window bar)
  2. The headline is tagged as h1, meaning really, really, important to Google
  3. On the index page, there was a link tagged as h2, meaning really important to Google. This link has dissapeared with time, but is still present on the t-shirt index page
  4. There is another link with the exact same wording in the right menu bar, wich is visible while viewing another of my t-shirt pages
  5. At the bottom of every page I have 30 links to ”recently added items”. Thus, a link with the exact same wording as the page title was to be found on over 400 pages when Google spidered the site
  6. My page probably has a higher page rank than the other pages found

The results will change

Now that I have written and published this article, that in fact, and contrary to the t-shirt page, contains the exact phrase ”I hate George Bush”, things will change. It might take a month or so, but eventually this page should pick up a position on those Google searches. Just wait and see. That’s the fun part about writing about Google search results. You know for a fact that the facts will change, and just by writing about a search phrase you are actively driving the change.

And, if you are at all interested in the t-shirt, it still might be for sale at TShirtHell.com. Just click here to find out.