It is time to start bomb bomb bomb, bomb bombing again. No, not Iran, but John McCain’s Google ranking.

In looking for a search engine optimization against McCain, the first step is to choose good websites to optimize. Here some criteria for good websites:

* The website should already be in the Google top 100, for searches on John McCain, making it easier to increase the ranking over time.
* The website should have the word “McCain” in the title of the search result making it easier to optimize.
* The website should be from a well-known news source, making is less obviously a partisan attack.
* The website should have a long life span, and not in danger of being removed before the general election.
* The website should be a negative news story on McCain, not an opinion piece.

So, in essence, the left isn’t even trying to hide their efforts. Instead, they openly admit their shady practices and bluntly put together a game plan via a publically accessible blog post.

John Hawkins of RightWingNews asserts that Google bombs could go as far as making or breaking the 2008 Presidential Elections.

Of course, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander and in 2006, the right side of the blogosphere actually put together a more effective Googlebombing campaign than the Left did, even though it didn’t make much of a difference in such a lousy year for the GOP.

That being said, it will be significantly harder to make it work this time. Google has changed its search engine rankings to cut down on the effectiveness of Googlebombing, plus, there is so much coverage of the presidential candidates that it’s just plain old harder to drive up links on their names.

Still, making sure a few negative articles show up under a search for Barack Obama’s name could, over the course of the year, turns tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of voters off to him. In other words, if the election in 2008 is as close as the elections in 2000 or 2004, Googlebombing could be the difference between the winner and loser.

This is going to be fun to watch!