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This sounds like another silly conspiracy theory to me, what is most likely happening is the exact opposite. These cheap news websites will take some term rela

by vfc1 7y ago

This sounds like another silly conspiracy theory to me, what is most likely happening is the exact opposite. These cheap news websites will take some term relating to Boris Johnson, like Bus or Model, and engineer articles that will get clicks in order to generate advertising revenue. It's the cheap websites doing SEO based on popular Boris Johnson terms, and not Boris Johnson's team. I mean the risk of someone in his staff of multiple people that would have to know about this to leak that he was doing it to the press just to push down on google searches unfavorable news would be huge. One leak and his career would be over, I mean come on it does not make any sense.

rsynnott 7y ago
> These cheap news websites will take some term relating to Boris Johnson, like Bus or Model, and engineer articles that will get clicks in order to generate advertising revenue. The three websites mentioned are amongst the UK's biggest news websites, reporting on legitimate Boris-related news (ie his alleged affair with Arcuri and his rather farcical claim that he's a model of restraint). The claim in the tweet is that Boris used the wording 'model of restraint' to try to mask the other story, though if this is true it clearly didn't work very well. It's credible mostly because of the prior bus incident; it's actually a fairly reasonable explanation for Boris spouting what otherwise appeared to be contextless nonsense. > One leak and his career would be over, I mean come on it does not make any sense. Wait, you think _this_ would be the controversy to sink Boris Johnson? Really? Boris is now so unpopular that the people who still like him are largely almost unshakeable, but even before his recent troubles, this would not have moved the dial.
- vfc1 7y ago
  If he tried to use the sentence model of restraint to bury on Google results the stories about his affair with a model, it would never work because the front page of google has 10 results, surely both stories (model of restraint and affair stories) will rank in the top results. At most, he might be able to divert some of the traffic from one article to the other, but no more. If that is what people are accusing him, it might be true it's possible that he is being advised to use this political SEO strategy, to try to divert internet attention from one story to the other. But the results would be unpredictable and marginal at best.
ineedasername 7y ago
> One leak and his career would be over, I mean come on it does not make any sense He's been credibly (if not definitively) accused of lying to the Queen. He's kept critical Brexit planning documents hidden. He's attempting to find any loophole he can to avoid parliamentary accountability and ignore public opinion on the most critical issue for the UK since WWII. Manipulating SEO doesn't really compare to these. If a dozen people leaked emails talking about the practice the response could easily be "Sure, so what?" and things would move on.

by vfc1 7y ago

rsynnott 7y ago

> These cheap news websites will take some term relating to Boris Johnson, like Bus or Model, and engineer articles that will get clicks in order to generate advertising revenue. The three websites mentioned are amongst the UK's biggest news websites, reporting on legitimate Boris-related news (ie his alleged affair with Arcuri and his rather farcical claim that he's a model of restraint). The claim in the tweet is that Boris used the wording 'model of restraint' to try to mask the other story, though if this is true it clearly didn't work very well. It's credible mostly because of the prior bus incident; it's actually a fairly reasonable explanation for Boris spouting what otherwise appeared to be contextless nonsense. > One leak and his career would be over, I mean come on it does not make any sense. Wait, you think _this_ would be the controversy to sink Boris Johnson? Really? Boris is now so unpopular that the people who still like him are largely almost unshakeable, but even before his recent troubles, this would not have moved the dial.

vfc1 7y ago
If he tried to use the sentence model of restraint to bury on Google results the stories about his affair with a model, it would never work because the front page of google has 10 results, surely both stories (model of restraint and affair stories) will rank in the top results. At most, he might be able to divert some of the traffic from one article to the other, but no more. If that is what people are accusing him, it might be true it's possible that he is being advised to use this political SEO strategy, to try to divert internet attention from one story to the other. But the results would be unpredictable and marginal at best.

ineedasername 7y ago

> One leak and his career would be over, I mean come on it does not make any sense He's been credibly (if not definitively) accused of lying to the Queen. He's kept critical Brexit planning documents hidden. He's attempting to find any loophole he can to avoid parliamentary accountability and ignore public opinion on the most critical issue for the UK since WWII. Manipulating SEO doesn't really compare to these. If a dozen people leaked emails talking about the practice the response could easily be "Sure, so what?" and things would move on.