Santorum: The Definition Page

The page at SpreadingSantorum.com, created by columnist Dan Savage as a protest against Santorum’s views about homosexuality, has maintained its position in the top results on Google for years. The page defines “santorum” as:

The frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the by-product of anal sex.

To understand more of the history of the site, and how it ended up doing so well on Google (and Bing, Yahoo and Baidu), see my previous article, Should Rick Santorum’s “Google Problem” Be Fixed?

The page was still in the top results for a search on “santorum” when I checked last week. However, Anthony Hecht alerted me this evening that the page had disappeared. Indeed, I see the same, though as I said, the related blog is now showing. I’ve had multiple other confirmations this has happened.

Before The Change

The before-and-after explains better. This is before, as of Feb. 8, the last screenshot I have handy for a search on santorum on Google:

You can see that SpreadingSantorum.com appears as the first regular listing; the official Rick Santorum site comes in at  fourth. Those positions are pretty typical of what I’ve seen over the past few weeks, as I’ve written about this story.

After The Change

Here’s tonight:

In this case, the official Rick Santorum site has remained in fourth position. The SpreadingSantorum.com page has gone. It doesn’t appear in the first page of results at all. However, the Spreading Santorum blog — blog.spreadingsantorum.com — does appear in the top results, listed sixth.

The first place position Spreading Santorum had is taken over by a page at Urban Dictionary, which says:

The sometimes frothy, usually slimy, amalgam of lubricant, stray fecal matter, and ejaculate that leaks out of the receiving partner’s anus after a…

That’s a pretty odd switch. Given that Spreading Santorum originated the sex-related definition of “santorum,” its pretty odd relevancy for Google to decide that a different site offering an even more explicit definition should get top billing.

For a search on rick santorum, SpreadingSantorum.com had ranked in the first page of results, such as in fourth place, as shown here. Today, it’s moved to the second page of results. And oddly, it’s not the home page that appears but instead one of its inside pages:

Anti-Santorum, Just Less Explicit

Here’s another before-and-after, this time focusing on the how the Spreading Santorum page used to appear, complete with explicit description, and how the blog’s home page now takes its place:

What Happened?

I’d say Google’s come under greater pressure about the “santorum” definition page as Rick Santorum has advanced as a candidate. There have been any number of mainstream press reports about it, including some debate on whether Google should do anything to “fix” it.

To date, Google has refused to make any change specifically to the listing, which is pretty much in keeping with how it approaches these types of issues.

Instead, Google prefers to resolve tricky issues like these by looking for solutions that may impact a wide range listings. For example, rather than specifically fixing how President George W. Bush was “Google bombed” to rank for “miserable failure,” Google rolled out a fix to solve Google bombs in general.

“Official Page” Change?

As I’ve explained before, the situation with Santorum is not technically a Google bomb, which is why it has escaped that pre-existing fix. But the shift might have happened due to an announcement Google made yesterday, that among about 40 changes to its search engine, it rolled-out an improvement for detecting “official” pages:

We’ve made an adjustment to how we detect official pages to make more accurate identifications. The result is that many pages that were previously misidentified as official will no longer be.

Possibly, the change is seeing blog.spreadingsantorum.com as the “official” page for Spreading Santorum rather than SpreadingSantorum.com itself.

Alternatively, it could be that SpreadingSantorum.com was somehow getting an “official” designation of some type associated with it, which may in turn have lead to a a ranking boost. Without that, the page dropped, with the blog moving up.

Link Change? Panda “Thin” Content To Blame?

Two other changes might also be involved. One is this:

We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years. We often rearchitect or turn off parts of our scoring in order to keep our system maintainable, clean and understandable.

Google wouldn’t tell us more about what happened here (we did ask yesterday), but it could be that the links pointing at the Santorum definition page are being evaluated (like all links are) in a new way that prevent it from ranking as well.

Alternatively, there’s this:

This launch refreshes data in the Panda system, making it more accurate and more sensitive to recent changes on the web.

The Panda Update is designed to prevent “thin” content from ranking well (see our Panda Update infographic for more about this). A single page with only a short definition might have been deemed to thin and got hit by this latest Panda update, which rolled out yesterday.

Of course, the Spreading Romney site is just as “thin” as Spreading Santorum, and that hasn’t disappeared. So Panda might not be to blame.

Other Weirdness?

For the search geeks out there trying to diagnose this, consider this:

That’s what I get at the top of the results for a search on spreading santorum. The first arrow shows how blog.spreadingsantorum.com is listed, then “sitelinks” are shown below that. The second arrow is pointing at the home page of spreadingsantorum.com, which technically is a separate site from blog.spreadingsantorum.com.

This sometimes happens. For example, a search on amazon sometimes shows me Amazon’s affiliate site as a sitelink for Amazon.com, even though the affiliate site its own domain.

But look at the third arrow. Even though blog.spreadingsantorum.com is listed as the main link, the “More results” link wants to bring back matches for spreadingsantorum.com overall. It’s strange and suggests there’s some confusion going on.

By the way, I heard back from Savage soon after posting this story. He’s made no changes to the site that he’s aware of that would have caused this, he told me.

Stay Tuned

I’m checking with Google for any explanation they have. Stay tuned for more. Meanwhile, the definition continues to rank tops in searches for “santorum” on Bing, Yahoo and even Baidu.

NOTE: The original headline for this story of “Santorum: No Longer A By-Product Of Anal Sex, According To Google” was changed because, as now noted, the Urban Dictionary listing is still keeping that definition up there.

Google Responds: It’s SafeSearch To Blame

Postscript (10:30 AM ET): Google has sent this statement:

We make more than 500 changes to our algorithms in a typical year, and with each of those changes sites will shuffle to different positions in our search results. We have not manually taken action to change the ranking of the site.

Postscript 2 (12:45 PM ET): Google tells me this is related to its improved SafeSearch algorithm, one of the other changes that was just announced. There’s no explanation yet about about why Spreading Santorum got hit while the Urban Dictionary page did not.

Postscript 3 (7:00 PM PT): Google says that the change even impacts results if you have SafeSearch set to off. In other words, even if you turn SafeSearch off — and should get no adult content filtered out — adult content may still be filtered out. That’s pretty weird.

The best I can think is that if you go back to what Google posted about the SafeSearch change:

We have updated how we deal with adult content, making it more accurate and robust. Now, irrelevant adult content is less likely to show up for many queries.

I’ve bolded the key part. SafeSearch was originally designed to keep porn content from showing up unexpectedly, such as when kids might search for “barbie” and get naked women showing up. Enable SafeSearch, and you helped prevent that.

But SafeSearch now seems to operate to ensure that porn, adult-oriented or possibly objectionable content doesn’t appear for a query that doesn’t seem to be relevant for that type of material.

Search for “sex,” and you might expect some explicit content. Don’t want it, SafeSearch can help prevent it. Search for “santorum,” and many people might not expect explicit content. As a result, SafeSearch effectively downgrades adult-oriented content even if you don’t have it switched on, because it deems that content to be less relevant to the search.

In the case of Spreading Santorum, the associated blog is far more than just an explicit definition of “santorum” as related to anal sex. As a result, the blog might not be tagged as adult while the now-missing home page was. When it went, the blog still had enough relevancy to effectively take its place.

That’s my speculation. Again, I’ll see if I can get further confirmation from Google. I’m also still trying to get an explanation about why the explicit definition from Urban Dictionary didn’t get tagged.

Postscript 4 (March 5): Google confirmed for me that SafeSearch does downgrade adult content if not deemed relevant to the search. Also, since March 2, the Urban Dictionary site has no longer been appearing.

Postscript 5 (March 8): Santorum’s own site now ranks tops, Spreading Santorum is back (sort of) and other notable changes are covered in our follow-up: Santorum’s Changing “Google Problem” — & Search Engine Land — Make The Rachel Maddow Show.

See also our new category for further updates that may come: Santorum’s Google Problem.

Related Articles

• Should Rick Santorum’s “Google Problem” Be Fixed?
• How Rick Santorum Is Making His “Google Problem” Worse
• After Santorum’s Win, The Daily Show & Colbert Report Laugh Again At His Google Problem
• Why Does Microsoft’s Bing Search Engine Hate Rick Santorum?
• Now, Mitt Romney Has A Santorum-Like Bing & Google Problem
• Bing & Google: “Spreading Romney” Ranking Tops For “Romney” Is Normal

Google’s predictions are here; Yahoo’s here. Let’s see how they did!

Best Picture

• Google: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (or The Artist, Midnight In Paris)
• Yahoo: War Horse
• Winner: The Artist

What went wrong here? With Google, it’s actually hard to know what it was predicting. It narrowed things down to a group of four pictures, then said that in past years, the “underdog” film in search popularity won:

If the underdog trend holds this year, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close could be our surprise winner. If we go strictly by search popularity, however, The Artist or Midnight in Paris have the best chances—among our group of four, they’re currently blowing the competition out of the water.

With Yahoo, its predictions relied on what was searched the most. The headline to its post went for War Horse based on this, even though one of its entertainment editors wasn’t convinced:

“‘War Horse’ seems to be the fan favorite, but this is a competitive category,” said Thelma Adams, contributing editor for Yahoo! Movies. “‘Hugo’ has broad appeal, but at the end of the night I think ‘The Artist’ has the best shot this year. ‘The Help’ is also a frontrunner, but it is showing a little bit of weakness as it was not nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay.”

Best Actor

• Google: George Clooney (or Gary Oldman)
• Yahoo: Brad Pitt
• Winner: Jean Dujardin

As before with Google, it didn’t clearly come out with a single prediction. But the two it ended up waffling on at the end, neither were selected:

The pattern emerging over the past few years is that the winner is generally in the middle of the pack in terms of searches and has relatively steady search volume throughout the year. First-time nominee Gary Oldman (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) fits that bill this year, but so does George Clooney (The Descendants). Maybe it will finally be George’s year to win Best Actor.

Yahoo’s, relying on search popularity, also failed. So did its entertainment editor:

“Brad Pitt is winning when it comes to searches, but I don’t think ‘Moneyball’ is going to win him the Oscar this year,” says Adams. “Clooney, on the other hand, wants it and I think he will get it. And, if I just went for performances, I’d vote for Gary Oldman, who is such a complete chameleon.”

Best Actress

• Google: Rooney Mara or Meryl Streep
• Yahoo: Rooney Mara
• Winner: Meryl Streep

I want to say that Google managed to nail it here, but it’s is literally impossible to know who it was predicting:

Among this year’s nominees, Rooney Mara is the clear breakout star, with a huge surge in search volume this past December for the young lead in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. However, it’s Meryl Streep who has the highest regional interest in NYC and while Rooney is popular in LA, she’s even more popular in San Francisco. So it could be her name that is announced when the envelope is opened—or not.

Google seems to go for Meryl Streep, but then it doesn’t explain if any of that regional interest was helpful in predicting winners in the past. And is it saying Rooney was more popular in San Francisco, or is that a reference to Streep? The pronoun use is unclear. And was San Francisco a big predictor in the past or just some throw-away fact?

As for Yahoo, Meryl came fourth on the list of most searched nominees. Nor did Yahoo’s entertainment editor get it right:

“This will be a close call, and not for Mara, my vote is Viola Davis, just barely edging out Meryl Streep.”

Maybe next year, search engines! See the full list of the winners at The Oscars site here (images above come from there).

Clay’s a friend of mine and I’ve read his book (it’s quite good, by the way), so I knew both that he doesn’t really think that SEO is killing America and that he’s unaware just how much we’re all over this particular linkbait-y title.

And indeed his talk was not about how SEO is killing America. Instead, it was about two things:

• As a culture, we want to be entertained and told that we are right. It’s much easier for news organizations to sell news that reaffirms our opinions than news that educates and challenges us.
• News organizations need page views, so policies such as the “AOL Way” may sacrifice investigative journalism at the altar of popular search queries.

Clay’s talk (and his book) are mostly about the former, but my interest is in the latter. In his talk, Clay noted that we broadcast what we want by way of our searches and clicks. In turn, others see the content we’ve made popular in “most read” modules on news sites and content creators write more articles on popular topics based on search volume. The danger is that we don’t always seek out stuff that’s good for us and the more we look for what’s more fun to consume, the more that’s all that’s available.

He cited the “AOL Way” and the practice of using search data to determine traffic potential of topics and to decide what to write more about as an example of how the media’s focus on SEO may be an obstacle to the best possible news coverage.

For me, this argument is another variation of the “SEO is spam” argument. Spam is spam and lumping it in with solid search engine optimization processes doesn’t make it SEO. Creating content simply based on popular search terms isn’t SEO either. In my book Marketing in the Age of Google, I addressed this issue at length and wrote about how tactics of spammers were mislabeled as tactics of SEO, but that it may be too late to reclaim the term. There, I wrote:

Integrating a search acquisition strategy into a more comprehensive business strategy includes:

• Using search data to build a comprehensive and effective product and content strategy.
• Understanding searcher behavior and building searcher personas that maximize customer satisfaction and conversion.
• Realizing the customer acquisition funnel often begins with the search box, not your web site.
• Integrating organic search with other marketing efforts.
• Ensuring technical architecture o the site can be properly crawled  and indexed by search engines so that it can be visible to searchers.

I have explored the search data issue in depth as it relates to journalism during my National Press Club workshops. At least three components are involved:

• Search data is valuable for learning what your audience is interested in to help ensure you meet their needs.
• It’s important for content creators (including journalists) to understand how to connect with searchers in order to gain maximum visibility.
• Investigative journalism is vital, and search may not be the best initial channel for reaching readers.

 Using Search Data

As with nearly everything else in life, you can use search data for good or for evil. Take the Super Bowl start time, for instance. In 2011, the Huffington Post famously spammed the hell out of Google by creating an article that basically just repeated every variation of related search query. Not only did this article contain little useful information, but one wonders if Super Bowl viewers are really a key target audience for a supposed news site or if the point was more about page views that keeping the public informed on the issues of the day.

But with the latest Super Bowl in 2012, the NFL created a page specifically for those seeking out information about the game schedule. Although they were using the same search data, not only was the page useful, but it addressed the NFL’s target audience. The point was obviously not about simply page views but to engage with viewers and get them to interact with additional content on the site. I talked to John Cole, who recently joined NFL.com to head up search and social media and is  responsible for this new tactic at NFL.com. He told me that user testing found that their target users found the information they were looking for regarding the game schedule much more quickly with the details they added to the pages. To me, this is a perfect use of search data: find out what your audience is looking for and answer their questions (making them happy and keeping them engaged with your brand).

The attempt of to simply maximize page views by creating pages about popular topics is not caused by the availability of search data. This type of reporting has existed since the beginning of time and the online medium simply provides new opportunities for creativity. For instance, when reading an article a few days ago, I came across the following set of headlines:

Why indeed did M.I.A flip the bird during the Super Bowl? When I clicked through to the page, I first encountered this:

Entertainment Weekly certainly is taking a page from HuffPo’s playbook by filing this story under as many keywords as possible. But what about the story itself? Do we find out why she did it?

Not exactly.

Being Visible To Your Target Audience

In the olden days of yore, the printed newspaper arrived at one’s door, and one flipped through the pages and skimmed through the headlines while drinking one’s morning coffee. Wearing a corset (or top hat depending on one’s fashion leanings). But things have changed. Now, when we want to news, we either go to an online source such as Google News or we search for exactly what we want to know. You can see this by checking search volume for  just about any news item. See for instance, search volume for [healthcare reform] queries:

Not only should journalists use search data to make sure they’re answering all of the questions their readers have about a particular topic, but they should make sure they’re using the language of their readers so that when those readers seek out content, the news stories appear. (You can see how simply a spelling change can make all the difference in the world with different spelling guidelines for “Gaddafi”). It’s not spamming or killing America to make sure that your headline contains descriptive words that match how readers are searching for stories.

This doesn’t only help news stories appear for the right searches but helps click through on those headlines on news sites and aggregators.

What About Investigative Journalism

Investigative journalism is trickier. No one is searching for information about the topic at hand until the story breaks, but how to get the news out there in the first place?  Certainly, this type of journalism is tougher to disseminate.  It was easier in yonder days of yore with the printed paper and the doorstep and the corsets and the like.  It can seem like a lot less trouble to just write stories that you already know people are searching for information about. I asked Clay how he recommended journalists go about getting readers for stories no one was searching for and he told me:

“I think the best asset an investigative journalist can have is a strong social network. But let’s not also forget that journalists usually come with a distribution point baked in. People still do read the paper. People go to nytimes.com.”

And he pointed out that these stories can drive search interest. What the media chooses to cover and the words they use to describe events have direct impact on what people search for and how they search. Once a breaking story hits, people do in fact begin searching for more information about it.

So perhaps, in fact, SEO isn’t killing America but can instead keep America informed.

Spreading Romney’s Remarkable Rise

My earlier story, Now, Mitt Romney Has A Santorum-Like Bing & Google Problem, explains how the Spreading Romney site created by Jack Shepler skyrocketed to the first page of Google’s listings within days after being launched. It remains that way on Google today, as well as Bing.

It’s a remarkable gain given that it beat out news stories and existing sites like the pro-Romney “Committed To Romney” site and the anti-Romney “Dogs Against Romney” site that are both years-old.

The Search Engines Speak

Bing told me about the gain:

Bing uses multiple signals and approaches in ranking search results. We don’t have anything else to add.

Google told me:

This site has been live for about a month and has attracted a fair amount of attention both on TV and online, and Google’s algorithmic rankings are reflecting that fact.

Those statements shed little light on the situation.

Search engines use many factors to rank web pages. To understand more background about this, see our key resources below:

• The Periodic Table Of SEO Ranking Factors
• What Is Search Engine Optimization? The Three Minute SEO Video!

With that background in mind, I’ll explore some of the factors that might be at play here.

The Freshness Factor

How people link to a web page is one of the primary ways that both Google and Bing determine how and what it should rank for. As I previously covered, the single-page site does have some links, but not so many as to expect it to do so well, so quickly.

One explanation is that it might be benefiting from something Google calls “Query Deserved Freshness,” which is when new content is given a boost for searches that seem to be especially geared toward needing fresh material.

Searches for “romney” certainly qualify, here. People conducting them are likely looking for new material, in particular news content. As a new page, Spreading Romney might be getting a QDF boost that may wear-off in the near future, as the site is deemed older.

Older doesn’t mean you can’t rank. Indeed, the Spreading Santorum site that inspired Spreading Romney maintains its first page position for “santorum” because of its age, the amount of earned links and authority it has gained over time, in my view.

In the end, perhaps freshness is an issue here. I’d largely discounted that because Spreading Romney isn’t a news site. But just being new, even if not necessarily a news site, might be enough for both Google and Bing, an interesting observation.

The Social Factor

I’ve seen a number of people question if social activity has caused the page to do well. Perhaps, though the challenge with this is that Google and Bing see completely different social signals.

Google has been adamant that Facebook data isn’t used for its rankings. The number of Facebook shares a page has carries no weight, Google has said. My understanding is the same is true for the number of Facebook Likes.

As for Twitter, while Google sees some tweets, it has suggested is has no way to properly count the tweets a page may have gained since the expiration of Twitter’s deal with Google last year.

Google does see Google+ data, of course –and the Spreading Romney site had gained about 300 +1 votes when I first wrote about it (today, the figure is up to nearly 700). Perhaps that’s what’s causing the rise with Google?

If so, what about Bing? Bing, to my knowledge, doesn’t use Google+ data. It does have deals with both Facebook and Twitter, however. The site had nearly 3,000 Facebook likes when I first wrote about it (now just over 5,000) and about 1,200 tweets (now about 1,700). Those might be factors helping on Bing.

Maybe. Maybe the completely separate sets of social data that Google and Bing both have, coupled with linking data and the freshness of this site, helped it move up so quickly. But it would be more compelling if there were a common factor.

“The Maddow Factor”

What about that “attention” that Google mentioned. It’s true. Rachel Maddow did mention this site had been created in January, as I wrote about before. Below is the video where she covers it. Note that she’s not saying that the site is ranking on Google, only that there’s an attempt for this to happen:

1. Visits: People go to the site, or search for it and click to it from search results
2. Votes: People link to or talk about the site after finding it

I’ve already covered what happens with the second item, the way people effectively vote for the site. Yes, there were links, but not an amazing number of them. Yes, there was “talk” in the form of social sharing, but there are issues about how each search engine would “add up” those votes.

Measuring The Maddow Factor & Interest Spike

That leaves the idea of visits having an influence. There are ways that both Google and Bing can detect if a site has gained an unusually large number of visits than might be expected, both by watching how people surf the web through their respective toolbars and by watching how people click to sites on their search results.

Were lots of people searching for “Spreading Romney?” Consider this:

After typing only a few letters of the word “spreading,” the suggestion of “spreading santorum” comes up on Google, suggesting this is a popular related search that people are doing. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be suggested.

At Bing, you also get the suggestion, but only if you type the full word “spreading” followed by the letter “s,” suggesting that it’s popular as a related search, but not super popular.

Now let’s consider Romney at Google:

 Yes, it comes up as a suggestion now, though you have to work for it. At Bing, it doesn’t at all:

Still, it does register to some degree on Google. How does it compare to interest in Spreading Santorum? Fairly well, initially after the Maddow mention:

That chart is from Google Insights For Search. It shows the relative number of people searching for the words “spreading santorum” (the blue line) versus “spreading romney” (the red line). You can see the red line spike right around the time the site appears to have been mentioned by Maddow, approaching about half the interest in “spreading santorum.”

The Ranking Trifecta

My guess is that Spreading Romney hit on a perfect storm of things in its favor to rank well:

• It was new
• It picked up a few links to add some relevancy
• It gained an immediate interest spike associated with “romney” searches

Had the Maddow mention not happened, I’m not sure it would have gained these rankings. The interest spike may have been the extra factor it really needed.

By now, a Spreading Gingrich site has sprung up that’s getting some attention. But will it get the trifecta that appears needed to gain top rankings on Bing and Google? Or is there no trifecta, and will spreading-style sites instead spread out to search results near you?

Stay tuned.

Related Articles

• It’s Not “He Said, She Said” Over Google Rankings & Facebook Shares
• When Everyone Gets The Vote: Social Shares As The New Link Building
• Google Kills Bush’s Miserable Failure Search & Other Google Bombs
• Should Rick Santorum’s “Google Problem” Be Fixed?
• How Rick Santorum Is Making His “Google Problem” Worse
• After Santorum’s Win, The Daily Show & Colbert Report Laugh Again At His Google Problem
• Why Does Microsoft’s Bing Search Engine Hate Rick Santorum?
• Now, Mitt Romney Has A Santorum-Like Bing & Google Problem

Postscript: There have been many updates to this story. See our Santorum’s Google Problem category for the latest articles.

Spreading Romney

I was pretty surprised to discover the “Spreading Romney” site appearing in the top results on Google and Bing in a search for “romney” that I did today. I don’t recall seeing it recently, so it appears to be a new gain.

Here it is on Google, as the ninth regular listing:

I’ve also seen it as high as fourth position, also in sixth and sometimes Romney’s official site doesn’t even appear. Ninth seems to be the most consistent position for it.

The searches I’ve done were logged out of Google, using the “incognito” mode in Google Chrome, so that I appeared as a fresh searcher that Google had no history for. I also tested this on two separate computers.

Here it is on Bing, in the eight regular position:

The site is a single page which offers an alternative definition for “romney,” as shown below:

“To defecate in terror,” reads the definition, with the word “terror” as a link to a Huffington Post summary of news about Romney’s putting his dog in a rooftop carrier for a 12-hour drive to Canada in 1983 that’s been making the rounds again to haunt him.

The dog, as the journalist at the Boston Globe who originally found the story in 2007 explains, apparently didn’t enjoy the ride and ended up having diarrhea that trickled down the car while Romney was driving.

Unlike the Spreading Santorum site, Spreading Romney doesn’t lead to an associated blog with lots of information about Romney. Rather, there’s a link saying “Indianapolis Web Design,” which leads to a design firm that that may have produced the page and is hoping for attention. I’m checking on this. The page also links to Spreading Santorum.

Amazing Rise With So Few Links

It’s pretty impressive rise to the top of Google and Bing, for a site that appears to have started around January 12. Less than a month, and it’s in the top results for Google and Bing. How did that happen?

One way to know would be to see the people linking to the site. Here’s what Google reports:

Wow. Not one person seems to link to this site, and yet it makes it so high in Google. It’s pretty much the same at Bing:

Only two links gets you to the top of Bing, it appears.

In reality, neither search engine is reporting what’s really going on. If you want to understand more about why they deliberately withhold this type of linking data, and why that’s bad for those trying to investigate these types of situations, see my post from earlier this year: 2011: The Year Google & Bing Took Away From SEOs & Publishers.

Maybe a third-party tool can help. I turned to the Open Site Explorer, which shows links to sites based on its own data from “crawling” the web. It turns out, this site seems to be so new that OSE has no information. Majestic Site Explorer did better, telling me the site had 219 links to it from 67 unique websites:

Majestic sent me a full report of all the sites it found linking to Spreading Romney. It seems to be a relative handful of small sites of various types.

The Linking Campaign

Here’s one of those links:

That’s on this page at Democratic Underground, where the discussion is opened by someone saying “Google Bomb away” with a link to Spreading Romney and the word “Romney” as part of the link. The discussion goes on to encourage others to link in exactly this way. The page has nine links like this, in all.

Fark has a similar link, though it’s not really instructions on “bombing” in the way that happens at Democratic Underground. Some Tumblr pages link. A link on Digg. One from the “True Blue Liberal” blog.

Spreading Romney Gets Rachel Maddow Attention

Exploring further, the site certainly seemed to get a boost when Rachel Maddow mentioned it on her show shortly after the site appears to have been created, on January 12:

It’s Not A Google Bomb, But….

As I said, it’s pretty amazing that this site has shot up in the rankings so quickly. It’s outranking long-standing sites such as:

• The American Romney Breeders Association (Romney is a type of sheep)
• The Committed To Romney site (which seems to be a pro-Romney site with substantial content stretching back to 2005)
• The Dogs Against Romney site (apparently dating back to 2007, with 25,000 associated Facebook fans)

For this site to leap-frog over those and others, it creates all the same issues that Google initially encountered with real Google bombs, the impression that anyone can fire off a linking campaign and make it into the top results for anything.

Google eventually fixed the Google Bomb problem in 2007. The people who assume that Spreading Santorum is ranking because of a Google bomb — or that Spreading Romney is also a Google bomb — don’t technically understand what a Google Bomb is. Maddow is one of these people, by the way.

A Google bomb involves linking to a page with certain words to try and make it rank for those words, even if the page itself doesn’t mention the words. When people wanted to Google bomb President George W. Bush’s biography into the top results for a search on “miserable failure,” they linked to his bio with those words. That made it relevant for them, and it ranked.

The Google bomb “fix” effectively said that if a page doesn’t contain the words that people are trying to bomb  for, then the page won’t rank for those words. That’s why, after the fix, Bush briefly ranked again for “failure” after the White House used that word on his page.

Neither the anti-Santorum nor the anti-Romney pages are Google bombs because they use the words “santorum” and “romney” on them.

Google Bombs Redefined

Still, the pages are viewed by some as Google bombs in the non-technical sense of appearing to be some type of practical joke that has been played, some out-of-line manipulation of Google’s search results, something that perhaps makes those results irrelevant. And the Romney site ranking so well, so quickly, certainly suggests this is the case.

There’s a strong argument that the Spreading Santorum site has earned its place in the results for a search on “santorum” because it’s a protest site that began way back June 2003. That site has been out there longer than Rick Santorum has maintained his own official site. When Santorum left the US Senate, he doesn’t appear to have maintained his own web site. His campaign site is relatively recently, to my knowledge, as are his social media profiles. He joined Twitter in July 2009.

Substance Vs. Pranks

The Spreading Santorum site also has an associated blog that’s regularly updated with criticisms about Santorum based on news stories and recent events. There’s substance to it, rather than it just being a joke, as some perceive.

The Romney site touches on a serious issue, the treatment of animals, but there’s nothing further behind it. It has no historic legacy. It feels more like a successful joke on Romney than some type of political opposition.

The latter will rub off on the former, I’d say. Both will be seen as equal, and both will be seen as if Google is just letting anyone — in particular liberals — do what they want with its search results.

Certainly Google should take a harder look at why its algorithm rewarded a site with so little substance to it, especially as Google’s “Panda Update” is especially supposed to penalize “thin” sites. Spreading Romney is arguably a “thin” site that’s getting past that filter (perhaps because it’s so new that it hasn’t yet been caught by it). The Spreading Santorum site might need to consolidate its blog into the main spreadingsantorum.com domain to avoid “thin” problems, too.

It’s Also A Bing Bing

Of course, everything about the perception that people can just “bomb” Google results to make political statements is equally applicable to Bing. But it’s rare to see anyone criticize Bing over this.

By the way, for those wondering, there isn’t yet any type of similar protest sites that seems to have made it into the first two pages of results on either Google or Bing for searches on Paul, Gingrich or Obama.

More From The Site Creator

Postscript: I’ve heard back from Jack Shepler, who created the site, who told me:

I’m not associated with any campaigns. I made it to be funny, and to make a point, and I believe it did just that.

and:

I can tell you that so far the site has received 44,492 pageviews, according to analytics. I don’t have plans at this time to expand on the site, but who knows what will happen if he gets the Republican nomination.

and:

The site launched January 10. A friend said it was on page 2 on January 14. It hit page 1 on January 16. Within a couple days it was up the 4th result, where it stayed for a while. I double checked the page 1 results with a couple friends on the internet to be sure.

Postscript: See Bing & Google: “Spreading Romney” Ranking Tops For “Romney” Is Normal for my follow-up story with a lengthy analysis of how freshness, some link gains an attention due to the “Maddow Factor” might be at work.

Related Articles

• Google Kills Bush’s Miserable Failure Search & Other Google Bombs
• George W. Bush: A Failure Once Again, According To Google
• Google Forecloses On Content Farms With “Panda” Algorithm Update
• 2011: The Year Google & Bing Took Away From SEOs & Publishers
• Should Rick Santorum’s “Google Problem” Be Fixed?
• How Rick Santorum Is Making His “Google Problem” Worse
• After Santorum’s Win, The Daily Show & Colbert Report Laugh Again At His Google Problem
• Why Does Microsoft’s Bing Search Engine Hate Rick Santorum?

Postscript: There have been many updates to this story. See our Santorum’s Google Problem category for the latest articles.

Wait, you didn’t realize Rick Santorum has a “Bing problem” that’s exactly the same as his well-documented “Google problem,” where a search for “santorum” lists a web page defining that word as the by-product of anal sex above Santorum’s official web site?

He does. In fact, Santorum’s had his Bing problem for months, if not years. It’s just that everyone fixates on Google. Even Santorum does when he gets asked about it, such as telling Politico last year:

“I suspect if something was up there like that about Joe Biden, they’d get rid of it,” Santorum said. “If you’re a responsible business, you don’t let things like that happen in your business that have an impact on the country.”

He continued: “To have a business allow that type of filth to be purveyed through their website or through their system is something that they say they can’t handle but I suspect that’s not true.”

It’s A Search Engine Problem, Not A Google Problem

In the wake of Santorum’s win, and no doubt eventual questions in some quarters about why Google still isn’t “fixing” things for him, I thought it was worthwhile to flip things around and discuss his Bing issue.

It’s worth stressing that this isn’t just some gay-loving-Google-liberal-leaning-hates-Santorum thing and more a general problem Santorum has with the major search engines. In particular, it’s a problem that’s ultimately down to Santorum’s anti-gay views.

Santorum & Bing: Just Like Google

Here’s what Bing currently shows for santorum:

You can see that just after the special news area that Bing inserts above the regular results, the first listing that the arrow points to is for SpreadingSantorum.com, with a description that reads:

Santorum 1. The frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex. 2. Senator Rick Santorum

Santorum’s own official site, RickSantorum.com, appears third on the list.

Over at Google, which gets all the attention, the same issue happens:

Google’s news box appears further down on the page, probably because of the special election results box that appears at the top. Spreading Santorum, the anti-Santorum web site, appears as the first regular result. The official Rick Santorum web site appears fourth in the regular listings, one further down than with Bing.

By the way, the same thing also happens at Yahoo. Since Yahoo largely depends on Bing’s results, a search on “santorum” brings up the anti-Santorum site first, as it does with Bing — though after Yahoo’s own news units.

The news is better for searches for Rick Santorum’s full name, rather than just the word “santorum.” In that case, his official site ranks tops. Here’s Bing:

And here’s Google:

Does It Matter?

It’s becoming clear that Santorum’s Bing problem, as with his Google problem, isn’t stopping many Republican voters from selecting him over other candidates. So should Google or Bing really worry about trying to somehow fix it, especially when any type of change like that opens them up to accusations about censorship or political favoritism?

Perhaps.

The SafeSearch Solution

The biggest issue to me might be the fact that as interest in Santorum grows, you’ve got more children in schools likely to be searching on his name. Getting a fairly explicit description in their search results talking about “lube and fecal matter” and “anal sex” might not be what a lot of parents want them seeing.

Both Bing and Google have a SafeSearch filter that is set to “Moderate” by default, which means it only filters out explicit images. Setting this to “Strict” will keep the Spreading Santorum site from appearing in text listings. That’s something parents and teachers can use.

It’s Not An Irrelevant “Google Bomb”

How about a manual intervention to solve this problem, which has mistakenly been called a “Google Bomb.” Didn’t Google do something like that for President George W. Bush?

“Liberal leaning” Google did. The Google Bomb fix wasn’t specifically designed just for Bush, who found people were linking to his biography in a way to make it rank tops for “miserable failure.” It was meant to fix any type of case where people tried to make pages rank for odd phrases that they weren’t relevant for. But questions about the prominent Bush listing helped prompt the fix.

The Spreading Santorum site isn’t ranking because of some type of Google Bomb campaign. It ranks because it is entirely relevant for “santorum.” It was created years ago as a protest against Rick Santorum’s anti-homosexual views. Those views are entirely relevant, in fact arguably more relevant the further Santorum advances as a candidate to be president of the United States.

To drop the site, Bing and Google would actually be making the type of political move that Santorum seems to think that Google is already doing (he clearly doesn’t seem to think about or care about Bing).

But How About A Disclaimer?

There is something that Google is long overdue to implement. Consider what it used to show when you’d search for “miserable failure” and got the George W. Bush biography:

See the ad above the listings that the arrow points to, which say:

Why these results? These results may seem politically slanted. Here’s what happened

The ad led to an explanation at the official Google Blog. Google does a similar thing today, for a search on jew, which brings up an anti-Jewish web site:

It’s long past time for Google to do something similar for searches on “santorum.” They are going to confuse some people, who will assume Google’s trying to advance a political agenda with its search results.

I’d say Bing should do the same thing, but Bing’s never even tried to have explanations like this. Maybe it should consider it.

But Spreading Santorum Is Here To Stay

As for Rick Santorum, as I wrote before, the best way to solve his Google and Bing problems would be to change his views on homosexuality or make a donation to a gay marriage-rights group. That’s what Dan Savage, who created the Spreading Santorum site, told Mother Jones in 2010:

Savage has not forgiven Santorum for his seven-year-old comments: “Rick would have prevented me and my partner from being able to adopt my son,” he points out. But Savage does have a deal for the politician. “If Rick Santorum wants to make a $5 million donation to [the gay marriage group] Freedom to Marry, I will take it down. Interest starts accruing now.”

That’s unlikely to happen, so Santorum will have to continue living with the Spreading Santorum site showing up alongside his own.

Related Entries

• Should Rick Santorum’s “Google Problem” Be Fixed?
• How Rick Santorum Is Making His “Google Problem” Worse
• Dear Google: Crappy Results Like This Don’t Give The Impression You Care About Search
• Google Kills Bush’s Miserable Failure Search & Other Google Bombs
• Google Says Stephen Colbert Is No Longer The Greatest Living American
• After Santorum’s Win, The Daily Show & Colbert Report Laugh Again At His Google Problem

Postscript: There have been many updates to this story. See our Santorum’s Google Problem category for the latest articles.

Commercials Drive Searches

Since the 2009 Super Bowl, I’ve monitored how the ads influence search interest, and every year, the trend has been the same. As people watch the Super Bowl, they search for everything they’re watching: teams, players, performers, and of course, commercials. The trend continues the day after the game as people talk about the commercials and turn to Google (and Bing) to watch them again. Take a look at the spiking searches for February 7th, the day after the game according to Google Trends:

Nearly every search is Super Bowl related, and searchers are clearly seeking out the ads. As you can see from search #8, commercials often cause people to search for the brands directly. Google Insights for Search shows that brands that advertised saw significant search spikes on Sunday. See for instance, the search volume for [bud light platinum].

They seemed to have really liked those ads in Iowa.

Google reported that searches for [super bowl ads] were 122 times higher this week and that the big search winners were Acura, GoDaddy, and M&Ms.

Where Are Advertisers Sending Potential Customers?

As I do every year, I took note of what advertisers included in the commercial. Did they include a web site URL? A Facebook page? Did they seem to even be aware of this crazy new thing called the internet? And then I looked at the advertisers’ search visibility. I was looking for the following flow:

Last year, many only paid attention to a flow like this:

I understand that Super Bowl commercials are about branding, not necessarily instant purchases, and I realize other positive outcomes exist (discussions on social media and the like). I’m just saying that if someone is searching for you, you may as well show up. And if you’ve gotten potential customers to view your commercial, you may as well make it easy for them to view more information about your products.

This year, many advertisers simply included their domain name in the ad (33 of the 53 advertisers I tracked did this). This approach can help cut out the search step, although as the response to the Dockers ad during the 2010 Super Bowl showed, advertising a URL causes people to, well, search for the URL. So you can’t always cut out the search step, no matter how hard you try.

Last year’s Super Bowl ads were all about Facebook fan pages (that often were impossible to find; don’t say “find us on Facebook” unless that’s an achievable task). This year, only fourof the ads included a nod to Facebook and all used actual URLs. Pepsi Max even went with an easy to remember redirect to Facebook: pepsimax.com/facebook.

Four commercials advertised Twitter hashtags (last year was the first year for this, and then it was mostly only for movie trailers). I was astonished to find that when a hashtag was included in a commercial, people instantly started using it to tweet about the commercial and the hashtag began trending. (As you can see, even the bands with songs in the commercials started trending.)

Of course, there’s a risk in this strategy. Things may go really well, as Audi found with #SoLongVampires, or very awry as Bud Light found with #MAKEITPLATINUM. (Did people really even use the same capitalization in the hashtag as was used in the commercial? Amazing.)

What began trending on Twitter also tended to show search spikes. For instance, take a look at searches for [echo and the bunnymen]:

So what we talk about, we also search for.

The Future is… QR Codes?

It may have seemed like GoDaddy used the same tired formula as always in their ads (although, apparently sex does sell, so I can’t knock sticking with something that works), but in fact, they tried something new this year: including a QR code in the ad.

The online version of the commercial includes the QR during the entire length of the ad, but when aired during the Super Bowl, it appeared only briefly at the end, so I’m not sure if  anyone managed to pull up the QR code reader on their mobile phone, rush to the TV, and scan it before it disappeared from the screen. Including it in the online version seems even more nonsensical though, as the idea seems to be that you’re watching the ad on your computer, see the QR code, scan it with your phone, and are brought to the godaddy.com site on your phone. I would guess that including a link to the web site in the commercial so that you can simply click and access the web site on your computer would make entering your credit card information for all those domain names quite a bit easier.

Scoring Search Visibility

So how did advertisers do in search? It’s difficult to come up with exact search coverage percentages. For instance, if a brand advertised multiple products and ranked well in search results for one product but not the other does the tick mark for that brand go in the yes or no column for search visibility? What if the product showed up for its name but not for its tagline?

For the purposes of the stats below, I used the following guidelines:

• I counted each brand once, even if they aired ads for multiple products
• If they ranked organically for at least one of brand, product, or tagline queries, I put a yes in the organic search column
• If they had a paid search ad for at least one of brand, product, or tagline queries, I put a yes in the paid search column

In a follow up column, I’ll point out some interesting choices, but for now, let’s just look at how well advertisers thought out web sites, search, and social media.

Of the 53 brands I tracked:

• 33 ended the ad with a URL to the brand site, 4 went with a Twitter hashtag, and 4 sent viewers to Facebook.
• 44 bought a paid search ad
• 51 ranked organically for the brand name (although far fewer ranked for the promoted taglines or hashtags)

Chrysler and YouTube

Last year, Chrysler’s Eminem ad was one of the most popular commercials of the game. I found it odd at the time that although they designed their site’s home page to tie in quite well to the vibe of that ad, they bought search ads to the commercial on YouTube. I felt they lost an opportunity to further interact with potential customers and lost some control of the experience (related videos could easily be to competitors, for instance). Their flow looked like this:

That’s not a bad outcome, but I thought that if they had used paid search to drive visitors to the commercial on their site, they might have been able to better leveraged the opportunity. This year, Chrysler once again had a much-talked-about ad, and they decided to mix things up a bit.

For [chrysler]-related searches, the paid search ad points at their home page, which is a great tie in to the commercial. But for other searches, they’ve once again chosen to promote YouTube.

This time, the YouTube link makes a lot more sense as it’s to the channel, so there are no competitor links and the entire page is focused on getting votes for the YouTube AdBlitz, engaging socially, and even includes an ad for the car featured in the commercial. All in all, I fully support this approach. They keep the branded searches pointing at their home page (after all, not everyone searching for the brand is searching for the commercial), which is tightly-integrated with the campaign, and they send those looking for the commercial to a page designed to specifically engage with them.  What a difference a year makes.

2012 Paid Search Ad to YouTube:

2011 Paid Search Ad to YouTube:

Acura NSX vs. Bud Light Platinum

We’ve already seen that the #makeitplatinum hashtag strategy both worked and didn’t work for Bud Light (they definitely got it trending, but for perhaps the wrong reasons). What about organic search visibility? Sadly, the brand web site doesn’t appear at all in Google for searches for [bud light platinum] (although they have bought a paid search ad to the YouTube page).

Acura NSX, on the other hand (which was a spiking search on Monday), does an excellent job with organic search, taking the top spot with a page devoted to it. (Although including the commercial on the page would have been a good idea.)

Overall, I felt brands did a much better job of keeping things simple and driving viewers to interesting, relevant pages that engaged them. Watch for my next post in the coming days for some specifics on what went right and spectacularly wrong.

(Stock image via Shutterstock.com. Used under license.)

Related:

• Super Bowl 2012: What Time Does It Start?
• Super Bowl 2011: Commercials and Search Visibility
• Super Bowl 2010: Commercials and Search Visibility
• Super Bowl 2009: Commercials and Search Visibility

The ad network analyzed search referrals on “hundreds of millions” of impressions across sites in its network between January 9th and 12th. And the longest search referrals — at an average of 4.81 words — came from Ask.com. AOL users are at the other end of the spectrum; their user queries average barely above four words, by far the shortest of the five sites that Chitika studied.

It makes sense that this would be the case, since Ask.com has been refocusing on questions and answers in recent years — and asking questions tends to involve more words than other types of queries.

It would be great to get real search query length data directly from the search engines, but they’ve never made a habit of sharing that kind of information. In May 2010, Google did release data showing that 54.5 percent of queries are more than three words — which falls in line with the Google (and Bing) data that Chitika shows above. But that’s the last time I’m aware of that either Google or Bing shared such information.

Searching For Santorum

Here’s how Google Trends currently looks:

The arrow shows how searches for “rick santorum” are now that second most “hot searches” happening, searches that are occurring far out of the ordinary. Clearly, people are trying to learn more about Santorum. What do they find?

The first link that the first arrow points at leads to Santorum’s official campaign site — or what should be his official campaign site, but I’ll get back to that.

The second arrow points to the now infamous web site that defines the word “santorum” as the byproduct of anal sex, as we’ve covered in detail in our previous story Should Rick Santorum’s “Google Problem” Be Fixed?

The same thing also happens at Bing:

The good news for Santorum is that he ranks at the top for a search on his own name at both search engines, which hasn’t always been the case, to my knowledge. The bad news is anyone searching for him simply by his last name still will find the anal sex definition coming first.

Missing On Bing

Indeed, on Bing, the definition comes first and Santorum’s official campaign site doesn’t make the top results at all:

Below The Fold On Google

Over at Google, the definition also ranks top for a search on santorum, but at least Santorum’s official site shows. Twice. And that’s part of Santorum’s problem:

The Santorum Donation Page

Notice the lower arrows linked together. One points at the RickSantorum.com site; the other at donation page run by the Santorum campaign hosted on Transaxt.com. Here’s how that second page looks:

It’s a big, giant donation form, paid for by the Santorum campaign. It doesn’t provide any further information about the candidate, who he is, his background, policy ideas and so on unless you click on the “http://support.ricksantorum.com” link near the top, which isn’t actually a great call-to-action to learn more.

Santorum Removes His Own Site From Google

Surely his official RickSantorum.com site listed in the top results is better, though? Nope. You see, that entire site has been effectively taken down. If you click to ANY page where that site used to be, say one of the over 400 pages that Google still believes exists:

All of those pages just lead back to the donation page. Want to volunteer for Rick Santorum? If you search for that phrase, you’ll get a page from his campaign site promising to tell you how:

But click on that page, and you’re back to the unhelpful donation page.

To Rank Top, You Need Something To Rank

One of the problems Santorum has had in ranking tops for a search on just his last name is that until relatively recently, he didn’t maintain his own dedicated web site about himself, a place independent of his elected office where those who wanted to know about Rick Santorum could discover more.

His campaign web site has helped, but by dropping the web site and pointing everything over to the donation form, it’s as if the Santorum campaign has taken all the “votes” its earned over the past few months and tossed them all away.

The Support.RickSantorum.com site seems to be the new location for all the content that was in the old site. Potentially, someone thought that by launching that new site, they might be able to get both it and the campaign page showing up in Google’s top results, perhaps in hopes of pushing the anal sex definition down or out.

That’s extremely unlikely to happen, even more so now than ever. Given that Santorum hasn’t suddenly embraced concepts like gay marriage, his rise as a candidate is only going to further focus attention from some on his views toward the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. That protest site becomes more relevant than ever.

Hide-And-Seek Doesn’t Help

But at this point, Santorum’s greater attention now as a leading presidential candidate (for as long as that lasts, given how quickly Republican front-runners get cast aside at the moment), really means that his official campaign web site ought to be ranking at the top of Google and Bing. It’s relevant for it to do so, for most searchers, I’d say.

But the search engines can really only do so much. Santorum’s site isnt following any of the SEO best practices that the search engines would recommend. It is literally playing hide-and-seek with them.

Maybe A Google Notice?

One thing I would like to see Google do. When you search for some things like jew, you’ll get a notice from Google like this:

It’s something Google does in cases where a lot of people might wonder why they’re showing odd and possibly offensive results in response to a search, as happened in the past with the “monkey face” image search results for Michelle Obama.

The “santorum” search certainly falls into this category, and this type of ad notice is probably overdue, even if Santorum’s disappearing web site is making matters worse.

Now go watch the latest giggle from Jon Stewart over the Santorum search results, from last night:

And hey, Jon, I had that joke about the candidates being like a box of chocolates first :)

Postscript (5:45 ET): Only four hours after this story went up, the Santorum campaign now seems to be reacting. The redirections from www.ricksantorum.com to the donation page have stopped, though I find the occasional redirection error still happens, as you can see below:

However, even with the redirection turned off, there’s a different issues. The support.ricksantorum.com site that was created continues to run with all the same content as with www.ricksantorum.com. For example:

• http://www.ricksantorum.com/pressrelease/santorum-momentum-rolls-new-hampshire
• http://support.ricksantorum.com/pressrelease/santorum-momentum-rolls-new-hampshire

Those are two different URLs, on two different Santorum campaign sites, that lead to exactly the same content. That creates another issue for the Santorum campaign, one known as duplicate content.

Duplicate content can cause Google or Bing not to know which page it should list in response to a search. It also means that people who want to effectively “vote” for a page by linking to it, which helps ensure a page may rank well, are being asked to split their vote.

To put it in election terms the Santorum campaign can understand, it’s as if Rick Santorum has cloned himself, hoping to win an election on Google but failing to succeed because he’s splitting the total Santorum vote between two different Santorum candidates.

Finally, another explanation for the mess might be that the campaign simply wasn’t prepared with a web site that could withstand much traffic. It tweeted today:

Although the URL says ricksantorum.com, it actually leads to the aforementioned donation page, because the redirection was put in place after the regular URL was tweeted.

Related Stories

• Should Rick Santorum’s “Google Problem” Be Fixed?
• Some SEO Advice For Bill Gates
• What Is SEO / Search Engine Optimization?
• How Google Instant’s Autocomplete Suggestions Work
• Google Kills Bush’s Miserable Failure Search & Other Google Bombs
• Google Says Stephen Colbert Is No Longer The Greatest Living American
• Google Removes Offensive Obama Image; Was It Justified?
• Offensive Michelle Obama Image Returns, Google Buys Ad To Explain
• Disturbing Michelle Obama Image Makes A Case For Facial Recognition In Google’s New Image Search
• After Santorum’s Win, The Daily Show & Colbert Report Laugh Again At His Google Problem

Postscript: There have been many updates to this story. See our Santorum’s Google Problem category for the latest articles.

As spotted by Search Engine Roundtable, people were asking in Google’s help forums why various searches related to defining English people returned the Wikipedia page about the C-word, as shown below:

The screenshot shows Google listing the Wikipedia page first in a search for define english person. It also lists that page first or in the first page of results for related searches such as:

• define an english person
• what defines an english person
• define english

For the record, Google tells us:

We’re aware of the results for this query, and we don’t like them. As always, we look for algorithmic improvements that will address thousands of searches, rather than manual fixes for just one.

A Google Bomb?

I’ve seen some reports wondering if the listing is being caused by a Google Bomb, but I don’t think that’s the case.

A Google Bomb is where there’s a concerted effort to link to a page with certain words contained within the links themselves, in an effort to make a page rank for those words, even if the page isn’t explicitly about that topic.

For example, when some people were upset with President George W. Bush a few years ago, there was a campaign to get people to link to his official biography with the words “miserable failure” in those links. As a result, the page start ranking for that.

Google later instituted a fix for Google Bombs like this. In particular, since the George W. Bush biography wasn’t explicitly about “miserable failure” nor used those words on the page, it was prevented from ranking for that term. Our stories below explain more about how Google Bombs work as well as the fix:

• Google Kills Bush’s Miserable Failure Search & Other Google Bombs
• Google Says Stephen Colbert Is No Longer The Greatest Living American

Much attention has been focused lately on how a search for “santorum” brings up an anti-Rick Santorum web site. Some have mistaken this as being due to a Google Bomb. It’s not, because while presidential hopeful Rick Santorum might not agree, the page at issue in that search is indeed explicitly about an alternative definition for “santorum” and does use that word.

No, Not A Google Bomb

So how about this Wikipedia page? If it were a Google Bomb, you’d expect to find some origin, to call-to-action somewhere on the web telling people to link to the page with certain words to produce this type of result within Google. After some hunting, I can’t find anything like this.

For example, here’s how the Open Site Explorer tool reports people linking to the page. The most popular text used in the links are for the C-word or involving that. None of the links show things like “english person” in them.

In addition, Google Bombs usually go off on Bing, as well. Do these same search on Bing, and the Wikipedia page doesn’t appear.

All this suggests a problem with Google’s own ranking systems, not due to some type of external internet graffiti attempt. Google told me they are looking into what happened and how to fix this. But with the upcoming holidays, don’t expect an answer or solution probably until the New Year.

Of course, by then, Google may face a new challenge. Thanks to its glitch, that Wikipedia page has now become relevant for searches on that topic. The odd Google search result were even added to the page, though currently, these have been edited off.

(Stock image via Shutterstock Used with permission.)

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• How Google Instant’s Autocomplete Suggestions Work
• Google Says Stephen Colbert Is No Longer The Greatest Living American
• Google Kills Bush’s Miserable Failure Search & Other Google Bombs
• Google Removes Offensive Obama Image; Was It Justified?
• Offensive Michelle Obama Image Returns, Google Buys Ad To Explain
• Disturbing Michelle Obama Image Makes A Case For Facial Recognition In Google’s New Image Search
• Should Rick Santorum’s “Google Problem” Be Fixed?
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