texas politics

Sen. Hutchison Will Become Texas’ Governor By Making Internet Think Opponent Is Gay

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How to attack your gubernatorial opponent? If you’re doing things Texas-style, you juice your search engine rankings with your opponent’s name attached a certain homosexual search term. At least that’s how Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison is taking on sitting Gov. Rick Perry.

Hutchison’s website employed metadata — non-visible HTML code used by search engines — that honed in on the search phrase “rick perry gay.” On Queerty, we use metadata like “gay blog” and “gay news” to, uh, help search engines point visitors in our direction when searching for those terms.

Obviously, Hutchison’s team wanted folks who were checking up on the latest in Perry’s sexuality (rumors that he’s gay have circulated for years) to end up on her campaign website, StandByKay.com. The senator’s camp has since pulled the keywords from the site, blaming auto-generating software for the incident.

Intentional or not, thus far the strategy isn’t working: A Google search for “rick perry gay” now turns up websites reporting about Hutchison’s tactics. And this. Oops.

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