John Ensign and Cindy Hampton photo, an example in web search games.

While recently researching a up coming story on The Legal Broadcast Network I had the staff look for a photo of Cindy Hampton, the mistress and wife of former Sen. John Ensign of Nevada's chief of staff Doug Hampton.

As is well known by now this affair has all the makings of cover ups, pay offs, blackmail, press intrigue but there were very few photos or pictures of Cindy Hampton, and the fact was most of the photos and images were of Darlene Ensign and improperly labelled.

Photo of Cindy Hampton and Sen. John Ensign

As we dug through the internet a fascinating game in search engine tweaking and utter journalistic nonsense started, and that was the huge number of blogs that would create key words with Cindy Hampton, or "picture of John Ensign mistress" and then just toss up any image they could find, hoping to capitalize on the amount of traffic there was out there on the search engines looking as we were for a photo.

So, as a modest experiment in how blogs and other scrapers of content are gaming and ruining legitimate search in many key areas, we have posted this photo of Senator John Ensign, his wife Darlene, Cindy Hampton and Doug Hampton, reportedly taken at a high school reunion some time in the past few years. I'll follow up and report what kind of traffic we get off of it, mostly as a public service and to point out how easily search engines, hits and traffic can be manipulated with games such as this.

Remember, here on The Legal Broadcast Network, we don't play games, we don't load up key words to bring in nuisance or low value traffic. We just produce original video, audio and written commentary on the law, politics and society that is of interest to a very specific audience of lawyers, politicians, law schools, journalists and others. Our traffic numbers are solid, legitimate and relevant and i'm looking forward to seeing to what degree this foolish picture draws totally unrelated traffic to our site. If you are an advertiser what would you prefer, any traffic at all or highly valuable, specific audience? You tell me.

Comments

[Floyd Hampton]

Thank you for finding and posting the photo.. My wife of 42 years, Cynthia, was so upset at the initial "Ensign"disclosures in Nevada and then nationally, that she contacted a local TV station and did an interview with them to assert that the Cynthia Hampton in question was not her. Since then I note, all references refer to "Cindy Hampton".