Search engine optimisation (SEO) and the propaganda war

If you google "Narendra Modi", it's depressing how far down the list you have to go (at the time of writing) before you come to anything critical. It seems that the forces of communalism know more about SEO than their opponents. I don't know much about it, but the key seems to be Google's PageRank algorithm (named after a co-founder of Google, Larry Page, and not after web-pages). The details are rather complicated, but in short it works like this: if you want your site or blog or facebook page to appear high up in searches you need a lot of other sites to link to yours. This pushes up your ranking - it gives your site points, if you like. Moreover, if you can get sites which themselves have a good ranking to link to your site then that ups your site's ranking even more. So web-people opposed to communal fascism in India in the run up to the 2014 election: even if you have strategic differences, please link to each other's sites.

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