Online activists at Drudge Report and Conservative Cave have mounted a campaign against a local city council election candidate, Steve Dawes.
What they did was get some people to register the name "steve dawes" at various websites, and then link to a fake Steve Dawes election site. Also, they posted to their own forums to boost the fake site.
The way this works is "pagerank". Google's search results are calculated based on the amount of "juice" that a page gets. Each page has a "pagerank". All outgoing links transfer this pagerank to the target site. The amount of pagerank given is page's rank / number of links.
So a site like SOC has around 2 or 3 pagerank, and with around 30 links out, you get 0.05 points per link. If you can get 10 links from 10 different sites, you might get a pagerank of 1.5 or something.
While that isn't a high rank, it would be higher than a site that's got no incoming links.
So, I guess some SEO advice for politicos is, always register all instances of your own name, on ALL the social media sites possible, before the campaign. (To get a list of sites, look at the "Share This" area below the site. AddThis has a list of sites.)
Then, link from all those accounts to your own campaign website.
Get all your endorsers to link to your own site.
Post on forums, or get friends to post, and link to your legit site.
(If you're wondering, I'm not neutral: I'm writing this post to boost the candidate's page. That's why I'm not linking to the fake site. You can find that on Google, at least for now.)
SEO
That means "search engine optimization." It's the same trick that had the top hit on google searches of Rick Santorum to point to places other than his campaign website.