Andrew Shotland over at Local SEO Guide had a great posted the other day about his analysis of backlinks to presidential candidate’s websites and remarkably the google algorithm correctly predicted the Democratic Winner; but was wrong on the Republican side according it to his analysis Ron Paul should have won hands down with more than 3 times as many links as Mike Huckabee. As we all saw though that wasn't the case. But anyone who has been following Ron Paul or his rise to internet fame knows that Digg users absolutely love Ron Paul they eat up everything that Ron Paul related. So of course he is going to have more links than anyone else.
So does this mean Google's idea of one link equals one vote is broken? Or is the Ron Paul phenomenon more akin to spam and therefore not as relevant? Because as we saw the number two Republican Mike Huckabee did indeed win. So maybe in Andrew's analysis he should have penalized Dr. Paul just like Matt Cutts would penalize a filthy spammer. Lets face it, Digg users basically spam consistently and blindly promote Ron Paul stories all of which of course point back to Dr. Paul's site. And as we all know it's a very limited number of Digg power users that really control the content of the Digg front page. And once it goes hot on Digg of course more and more people link to the story in hopes to get a little residual traffic from talking about the hot item. Voting up and talking about that item becomes the "in" thing to do. So it then becomes unfair to count each one of those links as a vote, because in essence they are manufactured links - in reality nothing more than a link farm.
So am I trying to same Google's algorithm is broken? No I am actually saying the opposite, that Google's algorithm is fairly on target as it goes with deciding what content is popular and relative. But it also shows a fundamental flaw in the Google algorithm, that people can give links and people can get people to get links and powerful people can reach more and more people garnering more and more links. So good news is that Google gaming will continue on as long as links are part of the equation. Even without links I am sure some portion of the Google algorithm will have some gameable component.