If you don’t know the story by now, US Presidential wannabe, Rich Santorum, famously pissed off Nerve reporter Dan Savage by comparing homosexuals to just about every type of sexual degenerate.  In turn, Dan Savage made Santorum’s name the definition for something really gross.

Dan Savage isn’t a search engine optimization (SEO) expert by any means, in fact, it could be said that this unfortunate search result is proof that Google’s search algorithm works just fine.

Because Dan Savage’s site, SpreadingSantorum.com, provided Google with the three things that Google loves:

• Content – the splash page for SpreadingSantorum.com features just the definition that everybody is getting grossed out about and little more.
• Search Friendly Site Architecture – Basically, this means the site is well built and doesn’t use any weird tricks, etc.
• Inbound Links – Once Dan Savage wrote about this new site, people started linking to it, then when people found out about it, even more people started linking to it, and now everybody is linking to it… and Google really loves that.

Getting to the top of the search results for “santorum” was a snap.

Plus, it doesn’t hurt that Rick Santorum‘s web team sucks as their job.  I mean, the dude is actually Rick Santorum, and Santorum isn’t really that common of a name, so he should be near the top by accident most of the time.  I mean, I have to share my full name with a bunch of people, plus, outside of my professional career, nobody really knows who I am, which is why I come in second to a crazy, radio preacher when you search for my name.  However, Rick… you’re in the public eye here! All you need to do is the basics and you can ditch the gross definition in no time.

Frankly, I’m not sure why I’m actually trying to help here… I mean, the guy is a homophobic jackass and even if I was on that side of the political fence, I still wouldn’t root for this guy.  However, I do hate hearing the press and a bunch of other nut jobs claim that this is all part of some left wing conspiracy to hold this guy down.

It isn’t, and here’s why: He actually did everything that is causing this bad search result to happen in the first place.

When my kids screw up and get pissed at me or cry or whatever, I always remind that that they’re not being picked on here… they actually screwed up.  You can’t hit your brother, say something gross in front of your sister, or skip your homework and then be angry when I send you to your room.  In this case, you can’t call gay people animals without getting some heat from the free press.

So, what’s this poor asshole to do? Give people something else to talk about. Change the conversation. Fight fire, with fire. I mean, it’s too much to ask for him to stop being an asshole, so let’s not get crazy, but at the very least, play the game when it comes to search engine marketing, social media, and so forth.

For starters, get some damn content on your site.  Right now, if you go to the official Rick Santorum site, you end up with a big ass donation page that is mostly made up of an image of your mug, crowing about how close you came to winning in Iowa.  There’s no content here at all… no description of your platform, no mention of your economic policy, no nothing.

Second, sort your damn site architecture out… that’s the stuff that makes up a web page (HTML, etc.).  Right away, you can see that your site’s title (generated with what is called a TITLE tag) reads “Iowa Was Just The Beginning | Rick Santorum for President”, which is only helpful if people are searching for “Iowa was just the beginning.”  You’re lucky you included your name in there, which helps a little, but not as much as you were hoping.  On top of that, you’ve got a big image and a donation form as the majority of your page, which is bad because it doesn’t give Google much to latch on to when it crawls your site to figure out where to rank you in their index.

Third, get yourself some more inbound links for your own name.  This is only part of the equation, mind you, so you still need to do the rest, but right now, one thing I can see is that more people are linking to SpreadingSantorum.com with your name than people are linking to your own site with your name.  While you have more inbound links than the other site in total, clearly a lot of them are for other things (that I can’t see, by the way, so I’m not sure what they are at all).

Basically, you want people to stop seeing a dirty word when they search for your name, get your shit together (pardon the pun) and fix it yourself.  Don’t run to Google and ask for them to fix it… Google isn’t the broken one here, your site is effed up.  I would say stop being an asshole, but I doubt you’re going to do that… so, at least don’t suck at SEO.

Related articles

• Dear Rick Santorum: 6 Ways to Fix Your Google Problem (mashable.com)
• Rick Santorum’s Search Engine Problem Hits The Big Time (paidcontent.org)
• How Rick Santorum Is Making His “Google Problem” Worse (searchengineland.com)