It’s worth exploring the mystery of Rick Santorum’s search engine conundrum before he ends his presidential campaign.
“Go Google Rick Santorum and Hillary Clinton,” the former Pennsylvania senator told the crowd during the Republican undercard debate on Jan. 14. That sounded funny to anyone who’s followed Santorum’s famous battles with the LGBT community. Why would somebody with such a notorious Google issue suggest the viewing audience go search for him?
To answer that question, I went to the search engine and was prepared to laugh it up. But to my surprise, a certain site has fallen to mid-page two of the results.
Now, that’s when searching for “Rick Santorum.” If you search just the Republican’s last name, he still generates less than ideal results. Still, it looks as though one of the Internet’s most notorious Googlebombs has lost some of its explosiveness.
Here are three theories as to why:
Google manually adjusted the results.
Google can and does manually adjust search results. Perhaps Santorum’s legal team was at work here? Although the site itself is still up, and still shows up in the search rankings, so I don’t think this is likely. We should note that Santorum tried and failed to get Google to remove the site back in 2011.
Santorum's campaign did some SEO work.
Digging through the FEC reports could indicate whether they hired out for help on this. I saw line items for website services and technology consulting, which might include SEO work. The first page of results for “Rick Santorum” look natural, it’s things like the campaign website, social media accounts, Wikipedia entry, major news articles on his campaign’s pending demise.
The first page of results for “Santorum,” though, are still terrible. If they did hire out perhaps they went low budget and hired the wrong firm. Or perhaps it was too powerful a bomb to be able to entirely defuse.
Google automatically adjusted the results.
It’s possible the googlebomb wore off because Santorum is so irrelevant. If people have stopped linking to it, or old backlinks went away as websites closed, then it could have fallen in the search results. Moreover, the particular page that we’re talking about is not mobile optimized, so it may have taken a hit in April last year during “Mobilegeddon,” when Google changed its algorithm to rank mobile-friendly sites higher in search.
Whatever happened, it’s key to note that a pinch of prevention beats a pound of cure when it comes to search engine optimization.
Laura Packard is a partner at PowerThru Consulting, a Democratic digital strategy and web development firm. Sometimes she tweets out about job postings @lpackard.