How Rick Santorum Is Making His “Google Problem” Worse

US Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum made a surprise leap ahead to practically tie Mitt Romney in yesterday’s Iowa caucus results. Now people are searching to find out more about him and discovering THAT result which makes comedy show hosts like Jon Stewart giggle. But rather than blame Google (or Bing), as Santorum has in the past, much of the fault remains with his own campaign.

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 “https://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:

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

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• 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.