A continuation in our series on how the major presidential candidates are doing in their search marketing efforts. Here are the previous two rounds: Round 1 and Round 2.
The 2008 Presidential debate circuit, along with announcements of record breaking fundraising in 3Q, builds further intrigue in the 2008 race to the Whitehouse. Fred Thompson has entered stage-right with much fanfare yet very little energy added to the Republican side. John Edwards lags in polls, but could lurch forward in
Still, Clinton, Obama, Romney and Giuliani are clear front runners and one thing is for sure – when you do name searches on Google, you can access a lot of information about these candidates. It’s my belief that name searches are going to be greater vote and election outcome influencers than are issue based queries. The name query is where the most intent lies. No doubt Google queries surrounding the candidate’s names are going to be a crucial influencer in forming opinion and votes for this race.
According to Google Trends, when comparing the 4 name search candidates, in Y2007 Hillary Clinton has the most name searches followed by Obama, Romney and Giuliani. Obama has the most news references in Y2007.
What’s really interesting is that to date in 2007 Barack Obama leads name searches in
Social Media groundswell by supporters of Republican Congressman Paul is interesting too. We’re always monitoring how Social Media affects organic search results so I may begin to track how he’s doing on a name search, even though, he’s likely to not be a national front runner. Paul has many, positive first page results – most of which sites can revised and/or manipulated by his campaign in one form or another, I would think. Others have written a fair amount about Paul’s surge. Josh Dorkin has an interesting post at timeforblogging with some graphics displaying the groundswell for Paul earlier in the year.
A couple of interesting notes in this round about authority sites: The US Votes Congressional Database of Washingtonpost.com has really proven to be an authority site in the Presidential candidate name search. This is showing up for both Clinton and Obama due to their congressional backgrounds. As well, MySpace, YouTube and Ontheissues.org continue to be leading influencers in the Search Engine Result Pages for most candidates.
In our Round #2 coverage in August, 2007 Barack Obama was the search marketing leader with a grade of A-. Here is how each of the four front runners rated in that Round:
- Barack Obama: A-
- Hillary Clinton: B+
- Mitt Romney: B+
- Rudy Giuliani: B
So how are the candidate’s name searches faring in Round #3?
Mitt’s campaign upgrades to A- as he continues to holds the top 2 spots on Google with the official site and there is really nothing negative on the 1st SERP. His bio page continues to come up in the #2 spot on Google search which is extremely important for people who are just learning about the candidate. New to this SERP as well is a positive grass-roots campaign site. Though his campaign may not be directly involved it’s a tremendously positive development for them and they hold the #5 Search Result with this site. Perhaps the campaign influences this site in the background?
Romney’s staff should watch out again for John McCain’s campaign which is buying the keyword Mitt Romney and displaying the following ad:
Romney for President?
Why Not Learn More About John McCain for President
JohnMcCain.com
SERP results: 2.39 mm
#1 – Campaign
#2 – Campaign
#3 – Wikipedia
#4 – News from Google Universal Search Mix
#5 –electromneyin2008.com (Grassroots)
#6 – MySpace.com/mittromney
#7 – Foreign Affairs
#8 – Ontheissues.org
#9 – YouTube.com/mittromney
#10 –
Stats on Candidate’s Official Website:
PR – 6
Age of Website – 2002
Using Google AdWords? – Yes, but not seeing results displayed here in NYC.
StumbleUpon reviews is showing the Tag: “Politicsâ€
Extremely surprising is not to see aggressive AdWords campaign from
In round #2 the site was using the words “Exploratory Committee†in the description, and they have revised this to Official campaign site provides news clips, video, a blog and information on making contributions. So now they are really leveraging this coveted space better.
SERP: 12.4 mm
#1 – Campaign
#2 – Campaign
#3 – Wikipedia
#4 – News from Google Universal Search
#5 – Senaate
#6 – Whitehouse
#7 – MySpace
#8 – Sentate.gov
#9 – Votehillary.org (Grassroots)
#10 – Washingtonpost.com
Stats on Candidate’s Official Website:
PR – 6
Age of Website – 12/1998
Using Google AdWords? – Yes, but not when I searched during this post! That’s a problem.
StumbleUpon reviews show the Tag: “Politics”
Obama is downgraded one rung in this round as I’m not seeing aggressive AdWords use and perhaps more importantly the search result returning at position #7 on Google’s SERP. Snopes.com has a post which attempts to debunk the Fox News and Insight Magazine smear campaign. While the attempt to debunk is positive, the fact that the issue is even showing on page 1 Google may be negative overall because it’s raising an issue, true or false – no matter. The StumbleUpon tag as “Liberal Politics†could wind up hurting this candidate in the long run with swing votes. Wikipedia has again taken over the #2 spot from the Senate bio page. Interestingly Obama leads in Del.icio.us page saves with 865 saves (compared to Giuliani with 78 pages saves).
SERP: 3.7mm
#1 – Campaign (tagged as liberal politics in StumbleUpon)
#2 – Wikipedia
#3 – Senate.gov
#4 – News
#5 – Senate.gov
#6 – MySpace
#7 – Snopes.com (possibly negative)
#8, 9 – Washingtonpost.com – Voting record
#10 – YouTube
Stats on Candidate’s Official Website:
PR – 7
Age of Website – 4/2004
Official Site Using Google AdWords? – Yes but not showing in this round in NYC.
In this round Rudy Giuliani’s campaign remains level at a B. On the positive side, they have revised the homepage title tag of the official campaign site to be a bit more aggressive and positive. Instead of just saying “Joinrudy 2008 – Homeâ€, the homepage is now titled “Joinrudy 2008:: Rudy Giuliani for President†much more proactive and positive and they are getting double name bolding on that result. No longer is Zev Adler’s site showing http://www.rudygiuliani.com/ in the first SERP, so that is good for Rudy.
On the negative side, there are negative search results and pages creeping further into the 1st result page on Google. A Rollingstone.com story associating Giuliani with Rove and Bush and Firefightingnews.com (Firefighters Union Letter On Rudy Giuliani) slamming him are both negative portrayals of Rudy, and it shows in the search results. The campaign must bolster the positive results such as the Time.com article and since Google News is injected into search results either at #1 or #4 when you search, they really have leverage their PR angles and get in the press consistently with positive news to counter such negative results.
Del.icio.us is showing 69-78 page tags/saves (depending on the exact URL www – or not) New to this SERP is Ontheissues.org, Washingtonpost.com Rollingstone.com, and Firefighting news.
SERP: 3.2 mm
#1 – News
#2 – Campaign (Tagged in StumbleUpon as “Politicsâ€)
#3 – Wikipedia
#4 – NYC.gov bio
#5 – Ontheissues.org
#6 – Draftrudygiuliani.com (a
#7 – Rollingstone.com (Negative)
#8 – Firefightingnews.com (Negative)
#9 – Washingtonpost.com
#10 – Time.com Person of the Year
PageRank – 6
Age of Website – 1/2007
Official Site Using Google AdWords? – Yes
Official Site AdWords Top Result Copy –
Support Rudy Giuliani ‘08
Join Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s Team Sign-Up Now at Rudy’s Official Site
www.joinrudy2008.com
Round #3 sees Romney steal the lead from Obama.
- Mitt Romney upgraded to A-
- Hillary Clinton remains flat at B+
- Barack Obama downgraded to B+
- Rudy Giuliani is level at B
One final note is that more and more, the name searches are showing Google’s Universal Search News results mixed into the 1st Google Search Engine Result Page. Blog searches are also being suggested at the bottom of Google’s 1st SERP. What’s the significance of this? Search Engine Marketers – particularly in reputation management should be well aware of news results. Online and offline Press and blogging is still is and likely always will be extremely important in Search Marketing.
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Stats on Candidate’s Official Website: (source: SEO for Firefox)
Last week Chris Sherman (Executive Editor from Search Engine Land) spoke at a very valuable Search Marketing Now webcast entitled ‘Leveraging All Search Marketing Channels’. This event was sponsored by 24/7 and provided pertinent information regarding various search marketing channels, both traditional and emerging.
The speaker challenged the audience to think of how many channels we are using and where we might be missing opportunities. Mr. Sherman believes the evolution of search has many parallels with television in that at the beginning there were a few big dominant players and ads were only available to big spenders. Later, as the medium developed smaller niche players and opportunities for smaller advertisers emerged.
In the world of search, at the beginning, we had three or four large search engines and now we are seeing opportunities in smaller, niche oriented markets.
There are two groups of search marketing channels: traditional and expanded.
1. Organic Listings
Natural search results derived from the full text of all pages found on the web
2. Paid Listings
Carefully worded advertisements consisting of 2-5 word title and 2 very short lines of text
1. Content Options
News and Press Releases – Many people aren’t taking advantage of PRs. By optimizing the press releases, companies can drive people and journalists to their site.
Always optimize PRs with hyperlinks to the URL to your site.
Remember to submit PRs to wire services (different crawlers).
Bonus – journalists writing about your news may drive more traffic than the releases itself. Opportunity to have your news picked up on 2 different channels – journalists and web.
Social Media
Simple definition: Internet way finding tools informed by human judgment. There is currently no good industry standard definition of social media. They do have some component of search involved but they are involved by human beings (voting on stories, answers questions, contributing content).
Why bother with social media? Social media sites are attracting huge audiences that have a memory (book marking). If you do well on these social media sites, people might find your content when they aren’t actively searching.
Types of Social Media
Collaborative harvesters – People on the web are trying to find content and recommend it to other uses (Digg, Netscape, Reddit, and Sphinn).
Collaborative Directories – ODP, Wikipedia, Prefound – These sites are created by human beings and not search engine crawlers. 
Wikipedia can be used for search marketing because you can add content you want (with caution – as the editors are suspicious of anyone changing content for marketing purpose) or at the end of all Wikipedia entries there are links to external sites. Wikipedia is heavily trafficked and the links can send traffic to your site. IF you have images about your product or service, you can upload those images and those images can have a link to your particular product or service page.
Social Q&A sites – Yahoo Answers, Answerbag – They have less value than the other
types because of the Q&A format so you don’t have much opportunity to influence people.
Local Search
Likely to be the next big thing.
Relevant for both small location based businesses and large companies relying on locally purchased goods or services. (Even large companies can take advantage of local search because most people are still buying their products locally instead of online).
Many players, so try to submit to as many as possible. Most are free or minimal cost.
Feed-Based Search Marketing
Allows you to have a direct dialog with search engines (if you have a product based inventory or a large site that you need control on what gets to the search engines).
Gives you control over what the search engine sees and indexes.
Types of Feeds
Web based inclusion
Shopping and product comparison
Local search and directory
2. Ad Options (beyond traditional)
2nd tier or alternative search engines
Operate just like Google, Yahoo – but with less reach.
Be careful: traffic quality can be poorer than with the majors (may not get the same level of qualified buyers and poorer conversion rates – monitor to make sure you are hitting your performance goals.
Advantage – usually less expensive and can target searchers not using the majors. Examples: (Looksmart, Enhance, Epilot, Marchex, Miva, Mirago (Europe), Search123, 7Search, PageSeeker).
Contextual ad networks
Backend works just like the search advertising platforms, but ads are distributed to content sites on the web rather than search results pages.
Be careful: potentially less engaged users.
Consider all the majors, plus the smaller players like Kanoodle.
Ad exchanges
Auction style exchanges designed to facilitate exchanges betweens advertisers and media
buyers (no middleman & potentially better audience targeting).
Players include RightMedia (Yahoo), DoubleClick (Google), AQuantitive (Microsoft), & Context. AdsDaq is a new player that will be launching soon that has recently launched.
3. Platform options – the web is now an object based platform, instead of just a text based platform.
Video
Two ways to use video in a search marketing campaign.
Optimize meta data to be found by the search engines (because the search engines can not see video – only text). 98% of videos aren’t doing this so it is a wide open area right now.
Embed URL in titles and inserts on video for people to type into their browser – simply by having your video out there you can drive a lot of traffic.
Podcasts
Are increasingly being picked up in general search results.
Optimize metadata (ID3 tags), but also optimize web site (content information (overview), unique landing pages, transcripts). Gives crawlers more text to chew on.
Create and submit RSS feeds with embedded podcasts (content).
Mobile
Similar to, but also very different from web based search marketing (difficult because of small screens and keyboards).
Crucial difference: mobile searchers have different needs and wants (big opportunity because of the number of users – definitely something that everyone should have on their radar and start experimenting with it). Need to optimize content differently- for example the navigation structure should be at the bottom instead of top. These users want an immediate action; they don’t want to scroll through dozens of links etc.
Two other key players – device manufacturers and network operators.
Big Five Areas for Mobile (verticals) – these are the players that should be involved in mobile now because of customer needs.
- consumer packaged goods
- fast food restaurants
- entertainment
- travel/hospitability
- financial services
Opportunity to get a big leap forward than competitors
Mr. Sherman concluded with posting the global question…
You need to ask yourself that question.
If you answer yes – you’ll need to spend more time researching the channels (e.g., The Digg of France is Scoopeo and Brazil is Linkk).
Take into account local customs, local laws. Remember what plays well in the U.S. may not in other countries. Don’t make the presumption that if something is big here it will be elsewhere (ex. Google is not the dominant search engine in China).
Chris Sherman asked the audience to consider how you put it all together. Answer these questions to help guide you along…
Is your SEO strategy aligned with your paid search initiatives? If you have that solid foundation, you are ready to go out and experiment with newer channels. However, SEO needs to be aligned with paid search first.
Are you leveraging all relevant search marketing channels? Not all channels will be relevant to all businesses. Ex. top five categories for mobile are very relevant for those industries and not for others. If it’s not relevant to your business and won’t impact your business goals – don’t move forward.
Are you integrating online and offline marketing efforts? Because we are moving into these peripheral areas with search marketing, we need to make sure our campaigns are integrated in online and offline efforts. To really gain the maximum leverage you possibly can, make sure all your campaigns are integrated and play off each other really well, reinforce each other.
Mr. Sherman counseled that we have much richer opportunities for search and we will continue to see it evolve. Keep aware of the new things coming down the line and keep an open mind and take advantage of all the new things that are coming on the web as that will make it easier to reach our customers.
There was a few minutes for questions at the end of the session.
What are some of the newswires?
Business Wire, PR Newswire are two of the biggest. Search or look for online news release services. Most are fee based, some are free and they’ll give you instructions on how to do it. Relatively inexpensive and painless.
Can you be penalized for duplicate content when on a newswire and on your website?
No, the search engines know that you’ll be on a newswire and you won’t be penalized for duplicate content. Newscrawlers and webcrawlers work independently. Not to be concerned.
Are Podcasts are more useful for staying in touch with existing customers or acquiring new ones?
Both, it is easy and cheap to do a podcast. Great way to keep channels of communication open with new and existing customers.
What do feeds cost?
It depends on the pricing structure. They could be content based (yahoo) i.e. Based on number of pages on your site. Could be based on the number of clicks on the site. Shopping feeds are the same thing and depends on the comparison engine you are submitting to. Consumer products cost one thing, another product category costs another.
What is the best social media option for someone just getting started?
Get out there and lurk, don’t jump in right away. You’ll find the sites are dominated by people who have been on the site for some time – you need to make sure you are familiar with the community and be careful not to promote in an overt way. The social media loves lists (top ten reasons to do x), if you have content that will help the page achieve their goals that is helpful. Tread cautiously. You might want to start with smaller, niche based sites first as the communities aren’t as hard core and a little more inclusive and may accept newcomers. You will get focused and relevant traffic.
What effects to you see on human powered search marketing?
People in search is very promising because human beings can watch videos, provide tagging etc. Yahoo Answers has introduced a rating system where good answerers get good ratings and are higher rated.
Thanks to everyone for putting on an informative web seminar… Chris Sherman, 24/7 Real Media, and Claire at Search Marketing Now!
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Sometimes I wish I was a movie star simply because I would have more occassions to wear gowns. I don’t even watch that many movies. But if I did have a chance to wear one gown this year it would have been this one from Oscar De La Renta. I loved it when I saw it on the runway, and it still looks amazing when on a real life person too.
So lovely. Sigh….
I decided to head on over to the site to take a look at some more gowns, and it seems that the folks in charge of Oscar’s website need to rework the homepage a bit.
When searching for “Oscar De La Renta” the first result is a link to the site (great!), however it is pointing to the error page you recieve when you do not have flash installed. I clicked on it blindly, and went to that page and got stuck. There are no links from that page at all to anywhere on the site. I am imagining the little Google spider finding the site, getting confused because there does not appear to be a robots.txt file, and getting sent over to this error page.
I know enough to delete everything and get myself back to the url, but I would be really curious to see what their bounce rate is. I know many people that would actually fall within their target audience who would not know how to get to the homepage from that screen. (Hi mom!)
Searches for other luxury brands like Lanvin, Chanel, Givenchy, and Jean Paul Gaultier do in fact bring me to their flash homepage without any redirects. I find each of these sites annoying however, since it is impossible to bookmark something that you like, the url never changes no matter where you are on the site, and hitting the back button brings you to the homepage where you have to start making your way to what you were looking at all over again.
So, if anyone from Oscar De La Renta (or any of the brands above) is actually reading this, I would be happy to go through your site and help you out. A little tweak here and there is all you need. You can pay me in gowns, and invitations to places where I can wear them. 
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Round #2 of the 2008 Presidential Candidate Search Marketing Face-Off (see Round 1 here) excites as new debates and mud-slinging color each day’s top news.
As we approach 2008, the primary season heats up spurring evermore intrigue as to how candidate names will be reflected in search. Greg Sterling posted about the CNNYT debate at
In Round #1 covered in June, 2007 with my very basic, “scholastic†rating scale, Barack Obama had the overall most favorable search marketing results, most clearly communicated messages and strategy on page 1 of Google for his name search:
- Obama scored an A-
- Hillary Clinton scored a B+
- Mitt Romney scored a B
- Rudy Giuliani scored a B-
Each of the candidates holds either the top 1 or 2 or both spots on the organic listings, so that’s positive for all of them and a strong foundation for their campaigns.
It should be noted that in my coverage of this Presidential candidate name search, I am searching the Presidential candidate names from
So following is a summary of what I see to date :
Candidate #1: Rudy Giuliani
#1 Organic Result – Official website www.joinrudy2008.com
(note: at one point in the day the #1 result was pushed by Google One Box with News Results)
#2 Organic Result – Wikipedia Page
#3 Organic Result – Bio from NYC Government site.
SERP Results – 2.2 mm
Stats on Canidate’s Official Website:
PageRank – 6
Age of Website – 2007 (formerly showed 1998)
Official Site Using Google AdWords? – Yes
Official Site AdWords Top Result Copy –
Join Team Rudy in ‘08
Support Mayor Rudy Giuliani Contribute Now at the Official Site
Search Marketing Grade: B
I’m upgrading Giuliani’s team on this round due to a better Paid Search call to action and some other positive organic results which they may or may not be fully influencing. At this phase of the campaign it’s all about fund-raising. In essence most voters know where Rudy stands on issues, so now they are addressing money and fund-raising in the top paid search result. “Contribute Now†is a strong and positive call to action for this sponsored ad copy. They should watch out though because Mitt Romney’s team is buying “Rudy†and “Giulianiâ€-based keywords which display ads for joining and contributing to Mitt’s team. Solution to combat Romney: Spend a little more. Of note: StumbleUpon reviews on Google Result is showing the official site tagged as “Politics†(at least from my account) Results #3 through #6 are showing NYC.gov bio from his mayoral days, Draftrudygiuliani.com and time.com 2001 Person of the Year profile – respectively. These are all solid results and relatively positive developments for the former NYC Mayor.
As well, http://www.rudygiuliani.com/ is still live and pointing to the domainer’s content and that’s just nasty and ugly for Rudy. I’m still asking Rudy to please do something about this. I did a quick domain tools lookup on this one and here you go Rudy:
Registrant:
Zev Adler
Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: RUDYGIULIANI.COM
Created on: 25-Aug-98
Expires on: 24-Aug-14
Last Updated on:
Read more about Zev Adler and other cybersquatters here in the Sydney Morning Herald and from time to time how to think about protecting your brand through the use of domains.
Candidate #2: Hillary Clinton
#1 Organic Result – Official website with great site links www.hillaryclinton.com
#2 Organic Result- official campaign site
#3 Organic Result- official Senate site
Stats on Candidate’s Official Website:
SERP Results – 14.3 mm
PR – 6
Age of Website – 12/1998 (Formerly was showing 2001)
Using Google AdWords? – Yes, but not when I searched during this post! That’s a problem.
StubleUpon reviews is showing the Tag: “Politicsâ€
Search Marketing Grade: B+
Site links are still appearing strong below Hillary’s official site in the #1 Google spot, so this is a great thing for her campaign. News results are coming in #4 on Google and it’s probably better that the official site is outranking news results on Google, this way there is a bit more control over the message of the candidate. The description of the site uses the words “Exploratory Committee†and perhaps there is a way that they team can use that ever so coveted description in a better way? The fact that this site is still ranking #1 on the name search is great. As of this time of this post there are no Google page 1 paid ranking showing here in NY and this is not a great thing for Senator Clinton. So a positive and a negative on the search marketing effort cancel each other out and
It would be interesting to see if Senator Clinton could get a link from her senate site – perhaps on her bio to say that she’s a “Candidate for the Democratic Nomination for President of the United States in 2008†and link perhaps her Bio Page on the Senate site over to her official campaign homepage. This may not be possible, but it is worth a try and may continue to yield consistent positive promotion of both sites.
Candidate #3: Mitt Romney
#1 Organic Result – Official campaign website www.mittromney.com
#2 Organic Result – Official campaign site interior link; Mitt’s biography.
#3 Organic Result – Wikipedia page
SERP Results – 2.37 mm
Stats on Candidate’s Official Website:
PR – 6
Age of Website – 2002
Using Google AdWords? – Yes, more aggressively in this round.
Official Site AdWords Top Result Copy:
Romney for America
MittRomney.com Bold Leadership, American Values. True Strength for
StubleUpon reviews is showing the Tag: “Politicsâ€
Search Marketing Grade: B+
Mitt gets upgraded in this round from B to B+ as he’s being more aggressive with AdWords, and he now his official campaign website holds the top 2 spots on Google. His bio page continues to come up in the #2 spot on Google search which is extremely important for people who are just learning about the candidate.
Candidate #4: Barack Obama
#1 Organic Result – Official campaign website www.barackobama.com
#2 OrganicResult – Official campaign site interior link
#3 Organic Result – Wikipedia page
SERP Results – 2.82 mm
Stats on Candidate’s Official Website:
PR – 7
Age of Website – is now showing 4/2004 and was showing 3/2002
Official Site Using Google AdWords? – Yes
Official Site AdWords Copy?
Get to Know Barack Obama
BarackObama.com Learn more about Senator Obama at campaign events: Register Online
StubleUpon reviews is showing the Tag: “Liberal Politicsâ€
Search Marketing Grade: A-
Obama has maintained the very compelling title: Welcome to Obama for
One area that they really have improved is they now hold the #2 spot with the official site over the Wikipedia result. Same as Romney, it’s the bio page. Google may have tweaked the results pages to show more relevant campaign information, but I trust also that there is work going on to promote the bios and that’s very smart on the search manager’s part. So, this campaign is still performing quite well and while it does not deserve a huge upgrade, it can certainly remain right were it is.
Round #2 sees that Obama is still the leader with an A- Grade in this Presidential Candidate Name-Search Face-off.
- Obama remains at A-
- Hillary Clinton remains at B+
- Mitt Romney is upgraded to B+
- Rudy Giuliani is upgraded to B
Some may ask: well, why is the top grade only an A-. I say, we’re not on a curve folks; this is the President we’re talking about. No A’s or A+’s handed out until we’re filling the first page with positive and official results.
Also interesting in this is how quickly the size of Google’s SERP page index is growing although I haven’t spent the time to check the percentage of page growth on the name search.
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Arguably one of the most competitive niches online is pharmeceuticals (pills). There are a couple of key searches that it is a good idea to always keep an eye-on to see how the search engines are handling them. The more competitive of a niche, the more innovative & risky strategies you are likely to see.
One such search is buy Viagra. Typically the top 10 is filled with .edu sites but Google has pruned a lot of them out and currently there is only one left. So who’s ranking high now? Social network Reddit.
The #2 result is for Reddit “user” buy_viagra_online. Still need more evidence of the authority power of major social networks?
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The 2008 election promises to be an exciting and hotly contested one. Jake Matthews takes a look at how some of the leading candidates are doing in their search marketing efforts on Google in Part 1 of a four part series – and gives each one of them a grade in the 2008 Presidential Candidate Search Marketing Face-off .
There has been a fair amount of community coverage of how the leading candidates of the 2008 Presidential elections are leveraging or missing the boat on SEO and in the Social Media networks. There are interesting posts that follow the quality and strength of the campaigns. Mima looking at backlinks to Presidential hopeful sites. Further on March 13, 2007 Michael (Solo) Jensen did a great candidate SEO review on WebPro News. Rand-Moz chimed in May with insight regarding keyword rankings, missed opportunities and John McCain’s nasty SEO blunders, while Jonah from Alchemist discussed the grassroots value of the web for campaigns.
With regard to eyeballs on campaigns through social media, perhaps the most celebrated and widespread demonstration is the YouTube YouChoose08 section devoted to the election. Google has this section in the paid results on candidate name searches in Google Web search, so they are promoting it fair amount, and just from speaking with other heavy internet users, it’s definitely a place where people will form opinions. YouChoose08 allows candidates to create a video dossier and for visitors to interact with the campaigns and voice opinions. It’s a totally new town-hall, and you don’t even have to go all the way to small town “New Hampshaâ€, to listen to the candidates speak. You Tube is a powerful venue for campaigns.
But what of SEO/M? I’d like to compare and discuss the recent candidate name search results on Google.com for the candidates Rudy Giuliani (R) | Mitt Romney (R) | Hillary Clinton (D) and Barack Obama (D). At this point, it seems that these candidates are the real players with big money and an honest chance to pull it off (even though Fred Thompson has made a splash without even officially entering). And, let’s admit it, as much as we’d like grassroots to make things happen, it’s going to probably come down to money.
So which candidates are using Google to their greatest advantage? Which political campaigns are running the best name-based search marketing campaigns?
For this discussion, we’ll begin with Google and we’ll continue on with Yahoo, MSN Ask.com at a point in the near future.
Candidate #1: Rudy Giuliani
#1 Organic Result – Official website www.joinrudy2008.com
JoinRudy2008 – Home
|
The Official Website of the Rudy Giuliani Presidential Committee. … Paid for by the Rudy Giuliani Presidential Committee, Inc. … |
#2 Organic Result – Wikipedia Page
SERP Results – 1.7 mm
Stats on Canidate’s Offical Website:
PageRank – 6
Age of Website – 1998
Official Site Using Google AdWords? – Yes
Official Site AdWords Top Result Copy – Rudy Giuliani for President 12 Commitments to
Search Marketing Grade: B-
I rate this a B- for one major flaw. If Rudy does not make it in ‘08, and there is a distinct chance he will not, he’s going to have to have a NEW DOMAIN for 2012, if he wants to run. Then, all the authority that he gains from this site in 07 and 08, will have to be redirected to the new site. Would Rudy’s 2012 site be www.joinrudy2012.com and they’d have to start all over again, building authority for that site? So, I believe that they made a mistake right off the bat by not using www.rudygiuliani.com or www.joinrudy.com
As well – Look at this! http://www.rudygiuliani.com
That’s pitiful Rudy. You’re scaring me. I might reconsider and give a B-minus or even a C for that one. This is a site running Yahoo Publisher ads and buying and selling domains. This is kind of sloppy, ugly stuff.
Also, for the title - ending with “HOME� C’mon Rudy, you’re from
Candidate #2: Hillary Clinton
#1 Organic Result – Official website www.hillaryclinton.com
HillaryClinton.com – Welcome
|
Official Site of Hillary Clinton for President Exploratory Committee. |
#2 Organic Result- official campaign site
SERP Results – 14.3 mm
Stats on Candidate’s Official Website:
PR – 6
Age of Website – 2001
Using Google AdWords? – Yes, but not when I searched during this post! That’s a problem.
Search Marketing Grade: B+
Senator Clinton is lucky enough to have sitemap links site links below her first result which is great. These direct links to important pages on her site are an indication of good, clean, clear crawling. As well, she has the 1st, 2nd and 3rd organic results. Her US Senate page is 3rd. With regard to title, Hillary’s campaign may want to tinker with it a bit. The slogan on her website logo is “Hillary for Presidentâ€, so why not just do a variation of that and keep with the theme while being relevant to a searcher. Try Hillary Clinton for President – Join Hillary. “Welcome†is good, but not a great call to action. And, after all, the end goal with the political campaign is to have people join them.
Candidate #3: Mitt Romney
#1 Organic Result – Official campaign website www.mittromney.com
Mitt Romney for President 2008
|
Official campaign site provides his biography, news and information on how to support his candidacy. |
#2 Organic Result – Wikipedia page
SERP Results – 2.10 mm
Stats on Candidate’s Official Website:
PR – 6
Age of Website – 2002
Using Google AdWords? – Yes, but not on name-search at the time of writing this post.
Search Marketing Grade: B
Not showing any site links, not showing any official site advertising on Google AdWords
Great title, but not leveraging AdWords properly, at least in my NY geographic region – that’s a travesty at this point; at least on a name search.
Candidate #4: Barack Obama
#1 Organic Result – Official campaign website www.barackobama.com
BarackObama.com | Welcome to Obama for America
|
Official Website of Barack Obama 2008 Presidential Campaign. |
#2 organic result – Wikipedia page
SERP Results – 2.15 mm
Stats on Candidate’s Official Website:
PR – 7
Age of Website – 3/2002
Official Site Using Google AdWords? – Yes
Official Site AdWords Copy? Volunteers welcome: Sign-up to volunteer at Obama campaign events
And another one that is displaying in NY:
Get to Know Barack Obama
BarackObama.com Learn more about Senator Obama at campaign events: Register Online
Search Marketing Grade: A-
Compelling title: Welcome to Obama for
So, for now, Obama is the winner in this Presidential Candidate name-search campaign.
One of the biggest surprises was to not see all candiates leveraging AdWords properly.
I’m going to leave it to a later post to discuss Yahoo!, MNS and Ask.com and I’ll let our site usability experts discuss the actually sites, because that’s the other part of the equation. I’ll also leave the on-site SEO analysis to someone else.
One question that I have for the SEO/M community and the candidate’s campaign managers themselves: Is it worthwhile to run campaigns or to pay any attention to search results abroad – such as on www.google.co.uk now or further, when you know the candidate has a distinct chance of winning the campaign. Hillary Clinton for example has a ton of strength to with the 08 Presidential election, so, she may be President one day. Should she begin to influence a search result on Google
Lastly, Amy Schatz at the Wall Street Journal did a great job of covering the spend on internet marketing as a whole among the Presidential candidates. I found it most surprising that Rudy Giuliani spent only $7,000 on AdWords during Q1 2007. Obama, by contrast spent nearly $72,000. which is a bit more in line with reality. So, another plus for Obama, but not quite A+ yet.
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As more businesses, small and large, bring their products and services to the web, there is a growing concern about duplicate content. Duplicate content penalties can wreak havoc with your search engine rankings. There are many theories about how to avoid it, but for smaller website owners, some of these solutions require large budgets. The objective for this blog post is to provide some hints to help you identify, reduce and resolve your duplicate content issues!
Let’s first clarify what is meant when I say “duplicate content.” Duplicate content is simply content appearing within a website that is duplicated either on the same website or somewhere else on the Internet. Duplicate content can happen from people copying or stealing your content but it can also be much more innocent. For example, if you are a wholesaler of a product (or reseller of a service) your production information will be similar or exactly the same as other websites on the Internet. Sometimes even pages from within your own website can be similar to one another, as this is usually the case with dynamic product catalog pages. Search engines use a filter to remove duplicate content pages from the search results, and the spam along with it. The exact percentage of content duplication a search engine may penalize you for is not known, as it varies from one search engine to the next.
So, I suggest you try to reduce your pages similarity to prevent any form of penalties by this filter. Unfortunately, this can affect hardworking teams of data enterers by making their job that much harder, but it is much better to suffer now, then to fall prey to these filters and get your site stuck in the supplemental index, or worse! Here are some hints to help you identify and eventually reduce duplicate content issues today:
Google Search: Yes- that’s right, as easy as it sounds, one simple step is to do a Google Search! For website owners selling a product or service it is important that you be careful when listing this product or service description (or Product ID number) on your website. I have a hunch that this content can pose a problem if you are a reseller of any item or service that may be sold by another website. This hint is to help you find out if your product or service descriptions are being used by other websites. You can easily cut and paste a sentence of that description content into the Google search engine browser. The results pulled on the SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages) would then show you some of the other websites using the exact content to describe their offerings.
For example, if you sell a Persian wool rug that you bought from a wholesaler, and then used the manufacturer’s description to describe the rug to the consumer, it is likely that another website owner/reseller is doing the same exact thing. Or if you are a real estate agent, using a website template that comes with default descriptions, you may want to check the text being used to advertise your offerings. Since this duplicate content may pose a problem for your website at some point, it is better to revise the content to be more unique. I know there may be a lot of copy writing work involved (depending on your product database, but it may be worth it.) Surely, if you have high quality, trusted links pointing at your website, you may not have to worry as much….
Trusted, Quality Links: If you are an online business or e-commerce website that sells a similar product or service to another site owner, than you may have some similar product descriptions and/or ITEM numbers, and it could take forever to readjust your entire product inventory to accommodate the search engines. So here is a hint- have your trusted links from authority websites, such as your local Chamber of Commerce, or membership sites you belong to, like Historic Hotels of America, point to these deeper product or service pages.
This deep linking from a trusted website can sometimes counter act the duplicate content issue, because by pointing a trusted website to one of the main product or service pages of your site, you are informing the search engine that you are not a spammy website and your products, even though some of them may be duplicated on other websites, can be trusted. If you do not have any affiliations with trusted websites or organizations, then you should learn more about HUB Directories, and gain some quality in-bound links from them.
Mirror Site: If you have a website URL, like this, www.mysite.com, and you have another website with the same exact content on it, like www.mysamesite.com, then you may just have yourself an issue with a Mirror or Duplicate Content website. The best hint I can suggest to resolve this issue is a 301 redirect of every page. If you aren’t comfortable with doing this yourself, you can easily have your Web Master or Hosting person do this for you.
Also, if you just redesigned your website, like www.mynewsite.com, and every page has a new design look and feel, but the same content from your old site, www.myoldsite.com, then you will want to make sure the www.myoldsite.com has EVERY SINGLE page redirecting to www.mynewsite.com or delete these old pages from the server. If you do not get this Mirror issues resolved, they will turn into duplicate content and could harm your ranking in the search engines.
Robots.txt: When you have services, that other website owners are offering, like real estate, then you may need to block entire pages from the search engine robot to keep them from indexing it at all. A hint to help you with this is to use the robots.txt configuration. This will tell the spider not to crawl specific pages in your site directory. If you are a large website owner, and you offer services that other website owner’s offer, then you may be interested in blocking text to the search engine.
But if you are a small website owner, I do not recommend this tactic, but instead you may have to compromise design for success on the engines, and turn some of your duplicate content into textual images- text that is an image. This can be easily done, and look just as good with the right web designer in pocket. Of course, I recommend that for every page you block using Robots.txt, you are sure to create a new unique HTML article to compromise for the loss. Search engines like larger, content-rich websites, so to keep your website growing, add content often, especially when you take some away!
CopyScape: Designed to help business owners fight plagiarism online, CopyScape is the final hint for resolving duplicate content. Through this affordable service, a website owner, or web optimizer can easily locate the duplicate content their site has listed on other competitor’s websites. Once you are able to identify the other websites with duplicate copy, then you have to determine how to find that content on your website.
If your website is small, this is an easy feat, but for larger sites, it is best to run back to the top of this list, and embark on the Google Search trail to determine what pages of your site show up. However, if your website is not yet listed in the Google Index, you may have to actually do a manual investigation, page by page. An easy way to do this is using CTRL F, to help you quickly identify a phrase or sentence that is showing with duplicate content.
With so many business moving to the web, now is prime time to take action, resolve your duplicate content issues, and reclaim your niche rankings. Happy hunting!
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robots.txt: People Don’t Always Want Search Engines to Crawl Their Content
May 18, 2007 by Tamar Weinberg | SEO, Search Engines
What goes through your mind when you read about the silly lawsuits against Google accessing portions of your website? What do you think when you visit the Internet Wayback Machine and find hundreds of pages of your site in its full form (almost)? Most of you wonder what is going on in the minds of these clueless people. Don’t they understand how the web works?
That’s right, folks. In case you’re not in the know, the web works in a certain way. A brand new site generally does not get indexed in search engines for a period of months. Over time, the search spiders find your site and your interlinked pages begin getting crawled. Eventually, someone will search for something and your website will hopefully come up.
Not everyone is happy with these search results, and oddly, some people just don’t want to be found. In fact, on websites that are relatively large, the spiders crawl so many pages at once that people have defined the silliest robots.txt files. For example, check the hilton.com robots.txt file (which I learned about during the robots.txt Summit at Search Engine Strategies last month). Note their first two lines.
# Daytime instructions for search engines
# Do not visit Hilton.com during the day!
Dear hilton.com webmaster: Search engine spiders have no understanding of English. Look at the picture that accompanies this blog post. The spiders run through a site, grabbing pieces of data to spin into a web — the World Wide Web — and then it moves on. It does not pay attention to your personalized messages (but on behalf of the spider, thanks for the attention). Spiders do not understand anything. Spiders are robots.
If you want more information about robots.txt, you can visit one of the premier sites for the Robots Exclusion Standard. Understanding the implementation is important. If you have personal information that you don’t want the search engines to find, you can block it out.
Simply use the following:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /mysecretdirectory
This code blocks all search engines from accessing content in “mysecretdirectory.” This is also helpful if you have concerns about duplicate content. The typical example is if you have printer-friendly versions of pages on your site, but you don’t want to be penalized by Google for having these pages available on your website. You could create a robots.txt file with the following code:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /printer-friendly
You’d obviously be replacing the /printer-friendly directory with the directory your printer-friendly documents reside upon.
There are additional applications of robots.txt. Some search engines, such as Google, will now let you specify the path of your sitemap in the robots.txt file as such:
Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml
You can also be selective and block off certain search engines, including the Internet Wayback Machine, as discussed earlier. This way, old versions of your site will no longer be accessible.
User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /
There are a variety of other bots out there that crawl your site on a regular basis. It’s not just about Google, MSN, Yahoo, or Ask. You can get an idea of what works and what doesn’t by experimenting. Note that if you plan on blocking content, it takes time for it to drop out of the search results if these pages were indexed already.
Fortunately, in my post about the Google Webmaster Central tool, I mentioned that you can change the crawl rate of the Google spider. Unfortunately, you can’t be any more specific and invite the spider only during late night hours. But you can set the speed for the spider to crawl your page at a slower rate so that it doesn’t negatively impact your web server or website performance.
Two helpful tools on robots.txt are the Robots.txt Generator and the Robots.txt Builder Tool. You are also encouraged to read the additional helpful documentation at the Google Webmaster Help Center.
Before you get mad at the search engines and start frivolous lawsuits, realize that it is your responsibility too to prevent the searche engines from accessing your web page, if that’s your desire.
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Kevin Gibbons tagged me with an interesting little meme he started and since he’s a loyal reader of 10e20, here goes:
My first job right out of college, I went to work for a web design start-up. It was started by 4 guys with a lot of money and absolutely no clue about web design or really even the Internet in general. They wanted to get richer and thought this woould be a good way (at this time the original RazorFish was worth billions, Organic was trading at obscene amounts, etc). I stayed with the company for awhile but just got so sick of them not having a clue and wasting people’s money. So I left… I wanted to do something different…
So I went to work with a family friend who had a recording studio on the Lower East Side in Manhattan. It was a small place but he was an extremely talented engineer and producer. The recording studio business is tough though (especially in New York and with home recording studios, etc). My job was to get the word out about his studio. So the first thing I did was create a website (with the help of my brother and my wife). But I wanted it to be different then the crap I had seen at my other job – so I started reading everything I could find about SEO (with lots of it being Danny’s SearchEngineWatch).
Within a few short months (sounds crazy now doesn’t it?) I had his site ranking at the top of Google for just about any recording studio related term there was. He was ranking #1 for recording studio (above Abbey Road, Hit Factory, etc). Now with a small recording studio, you can only sell so much space/time – so it got to the point where we had to remove the phone number and you could only book through the site. My job was done and I moved on to creating 10e20….
PS> The guy eventually moved on completely from the studio (letting the website lapse) but he’s now doing major movie scores and a few hit records…
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Good advice does not necessarily have a single application. Solid advice can be “recycled” and used for a variety of situations. In January, I wrote how advice for startups can be applied to marketing a website. A recent post I read applied advice in human resources to SEO. I want to take that post and go the next step: into the world of social media.
This post highlights four main points, all of which have applications just about anywhere when you are looking to become active in the social media world and to have the sites that people care to share.
Lesson 1: Attract Attention
The key to being discovered is having something that attracts attention. Whether you write a list post, a how-to, or you gather a collection of viral photos, the key is about writing something that captivates your audience, whoever they may be. The title needs to grab the eye. Graphics can even further help the cause. Do something different. An old post by Robert Scoble about blogger Kathy Sierra resounds in my mind almost every time I write a blog post.
For social media sites like Digg, you’re limited to a description that is short and sweet, but you need to say something that attracts the attention of other users of the service so that your story gets promoted. Look at successful stories and see what it takes. Don’t simply reiterate the title in the description. Be descriptive enough without losing the reader.
Lesson 2: Know Your Keywords
Keywords in social media are important. Just like selling yourself in HR and your site in SEO, you need to sell your linkbait by using those prominent keywords that will ultimately be linked to when your viral campaign kicks off. Without at least some mention of the keywords in the obvious areas, you may not attract the right audience. Use the right keywords, and for any social media submission, study the power words and use them as needed.
Lesson 3: It’s Important to be Popular
You have no idea how important this is in social media. Having a lot of friends is critical. If you’re a nobody and are perceived as such, you won’t get far. You can’t create a website and expect traffic to come without any marketing or promotional efforts. The quote, “If you build it, they will come” is not true. Become well-known. With millions of users on the Internet, you’re not a big deal unless you put effort into self-promotion. That’s how you become popular. Be active in your community. Befriend people with similar interests and they’ll reciprocate.
Lesson 4: Stand Out in the Crowd
Beyond being like everyone else, you need to do more. What do typical users of social media networks do? Not much. In order to be a success, you need to study the network — and this will take time — to know what stands out and lets you be noticed by others. The popularity will follow, but they do go hand in hand.
There’s the difference between what’s good and what’s great. Be outstanding. Work on content that people notice. Use those keywords to draw the attention and your popularity will follow.
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