Rick Santorum’s Google Problem
I have talked with a lot of attorneys who are upset by what comes up when they Google their name. Luckily, through proactive online reputation management, most offending results can be pushed down. But what happens if your name is purposely targeted by hundreds of thousands of people bent on ruining your Google reputation?
This is the unfortunate case of Presidential hopeful Rick Santorum, whose “Google Problem” is now stuff of legend. In 2003, then Senator Santorum made some controversial statements about homosexuality. In response, a nationally syndicated sex advice columnist, Dan Savage started a campaign to redefine “Santorum” as a disgusting aspect of a gay sex act. A website was created for the term and it has occupied the number one position in Google for the past 8 years. Worse, many of the other results for the Senator’s name reference the controversy. This means that Senator’s Santorum’s actual website is the 5th result for “rick santorum“.
So why does Google have it out for the Republican candidate? And what could he do to rectify the problem? Well the first answer is that they definitely do not have it out for the ex Senator from Pennsylvania. Google relies on their algorithm to sort things out. While I don’t pretend to know the exact Google algorithm (they change it 6-8 times a day) there are 3 obvious factors that play a role here.
The Streisand Effect – the candidate should never have talked about the controversy in the press – which he has done on a number of occasions. This generated much more interest and caused a huge spike in links to the bad site – many from highly ranked media websites. I have seen this happen at a smaller level with attorneys who are moved to respond to a negative review on a website like ripoffreport.com. This is always a bad idea since the new content will only make the negative item a stronger search result and attract additional comments from others.
Links – The offending website has over 18,000 inbound links while Rick’s campaign site has just over 3000 inbound links. If Rick is to bridge the gap, he will need to get serious about link building. I would also suggest that the campaign enlist a team of fanatic bloggers to chronicle their campaign. Maybe some conservative Arizona attorneys might throw some links his way? I would also suggest adding more content to the home page. Rick Santorum’s website is nice to look at but it has barely any content on it. (This is one reason why the massive law firms never show up in Google searches).
With all that said, this Google Problem may be too big too fix. Even if they did attempt to search engine optimize their way out of it, their efforts would likely re-spark a renewed SEO arms race with the other side – who will likely be deeply motivated to prevent a Santorum presidency. His only hope may be to give in to the extortionist demands of Dan Savage and donate $5 million to a gay rights organization.