Perhaps Google may finally have to figure out a “fix” for Rick Santorum’s “Google Problem,” now that an anti-Romney site is making it appear that anyone can rank any protest page for any politician’s name. Bing has the same problem, but no one ever seems to care about that.

Spreading Romney

I was pretty surprised to discover the “Spreading Romney” site appearing in the top results on Google and Bing in a search for “romney” that I did today. I don’t recall seeing it recently, so it appears to be a new gain.

Here it is on Google, as the ninth regular listing:

I’ve also seen it as high as fourth position, also in sixth and sometimes Romney’s official site doesn’t even appear. Ninth seems to be the most consistent position for it.

The searches I’ve done were logged out of Google, using the “incognito” mode in Google Chrome, so that I appeared as a fresh searcher that Google had no history for. I also tested this on two separate computers.

Here it is on Bing, in the eight regular position:

The site is a single page which offers an alternative definition for “romney,” as shown below:

“To defecate in terror,” reads the definition, with the word “terror” as a link to a Huffington Post summary of news about Romney’s putting his dog in a rooftop carrier for a 12-hour drive to Canada in 1983 that’s been making the rounds again to haunt him.

The dog, as the journalist at the Boston Globe who originally found the story in 2007 explains, apparently didn’t enjoy the ride and ended up having diarrhea that trickled down the car while Romney was driving.

Unlike the Spreading Santorum site, Spreading Romney doesn’t lead to an associated blog with lots of information about Romney. Rather, there’s a link saying “Indianapolis Web Design,” which leads to a design firm that that may have produced the page and is hoping for attention. I’m checking on this. The page also links to Spreading Santorum.

Amazing Rise With So Few Links

It’s pretty impressive rise to the top of Google and Bing, for a site that appears to have started around January 12. Less than a month, and it’s in the top results for Google and Bing. How did that happen?

One way to know would be to see the people linking to the site. Here’s what Google reports:

Wow. Not one person seems to link to this site, and yet it makes it so high in Google. It’s pretty much the same at Bing:

Only two links gets you to the top of Bing, it appears.

In reality, neither search engine is reporting what’s really going on. If you want to understand more about why they deliberately withhold this type of linking data, and why that’s bad for those trying to investigate these types of situations, see my post from earlier this year: 2011: The Year Google & Bing Took Away From SEOs & Publishers.

Maybe a third-party tool can help. I turned to the Open Site Explorer, which shows links to sites based on its own data from “crawling” the web. It turns out, this site seems to be so new that OSE has no information. Majestic Site Explorer did better, telling me the site had 219 links to it from 67 unique websites:

Majestic sent me a full report of all the sites it found linking to Spreading Romney. It seems to be a relative handful of small sites of various types.

The Linking Campaign

Here’s one of those links:

That’s on this page at Democratic Underground, where the discussion is opened by someone saying “Google Bomb away” with a link to Spreading Romney and the word “Romney” as part of the link. The discussion goes on to encourage others to link in exactly this way. The page has nine links like this, in all.

Fark has a similar link, though it’s not really instructions on “bombing” in the way that happens at Democratic Underground. Some Tumblr pages link. A link on Digg. One from the “True Blue Liberal” blog.

Spreading Romney Gets Rachel Maddow Attention

Exploring further, the site certainly seemed to get a boost when Rachel Maddow mentioned it on her show shortly after the site appears to have been created, on January 12:

It’s Not A Google Bomb, But….

As I said, it’s pretty amazing that this site has shot up in the rankings so quickly. It’s outranking long-standing sites such as:

The American Romney Breeders Association (Romney is a type of sheep)

The Committed To Romney site (which seems to be a pro-Romney site with substantial content stretching back to 2005)

The Dogs Against Romney site (apparently dating back to 2007, with 25,000 associated Facebook fans)

For this site to leap-frog over those and others, it creates all the same issues that Google initially encountered with real Google bombs, the impression that anyone can fire off a linking campaign and make it into the top results for anything.

Google eventually fixed the Google Bomb problem in 2007. The people who assume that Spreading Santorum is ranking because of a Google bomb — or that Spreading Romney is also a Google bomb — don’t technically understand what a Google Bomb is. Maddow is one of these people, by the way.

A Google bomb involves linking to a page with certain words to try and make it rank for those words, even if the page itself doesn’t mention the words. When people wanted to Google bomb President George W. Bush’s biography into the top results for a search on “miserable failure,” they linked to his bio with those words. That made it relevant for them, and it ranked.

The Google bomb “fix” effectively said that if a page doesn’t contain the words that people are trying to bomb for, then the page won’t rank for those words. That’s why, after the fix, Bush briefly ranked again for “failure” after the White House used that word on his page.

Neither the anti-Santorum nor the anti-Romney pages are Google bombs because they use the words “santorum” and “romney” on them.

Google Bombs Redefined

Still, the pages are viewed by some as Google bombs in the non-technical sense of appearing to be some type of practical joke that has been played, some out-of-line manipulation of Google’s search results, something that perhaps makes those results irrelevant. And the Romney site ranking so well, so quickly, certainly suggests this is the case.

There’s a strong argument that the Spreading Santorum site has earned its place in the results for a search on “santorum” because it’s a protest site that began way back June 2003. That site has been out there longer than Rick Santorum has maintained his own official site. When Santorum left the US Senate, he doesn’t appear to have maintained his own web site. His campaign site is relatively recently, to my knowledge, as are his social media profiles. He joined Twitter in July 2009.

Substance Vs. Pranks

The Spreading Santorum site also has an associated blog that’s regularly updated with criticisms about Santorum based on news stories and recent events. There’s substance to it, rather than it just being a joke, as some perceive.

The Romney site touches on a serious issue, the treatment of animals, but there’s nothing further behind it. It has no historic legacy. It feels more like a successful joke on Romney than some type of political opposition.

The latter will rub off on the former, I’d say. Both will be seen as equal, and both will be seen as if Google is just letting anyone — in particular liberals — do what they want with its search results.

Certainly Google should take a harder look at why its algorithm rewarded a site with so little substance to it, especially as Google’s “Panda Update” is especially supposed to penalize “thin” sites. Spreading Romney is arguably a “thin” site that’s getting past that filter (perhaps because it’s so new that it hasn’t yet been caught by it). The Spreading Santorum site might need to consolidate its blog into the main spreadingsantorum.com domain to avoid “thin” problems, too.

It’s Also A Bing Bing

Of course, everything about the perception that people can just “bomb” Google results to make political statements is equally applicable to Bing. But it’s rare to see anyone criticize Bing over this.

By the way, for those wondering, there isn’t yet any type of similar protest sites that seems to have made it into the first two pages of results on either Google or Bing for searches on Paul, Gingrich or Obama.

More From The Site Creator

Postscript: I’ve heard back from Jack Shepler, who created the site, who told me:

I’m not associated with any campaigns. I made it to be funny, and to make a point, and I believe it did just that.

and:

I can tell you that so far the site has received 44,492 pageviews, according to analytics. I don’t have plans at this time to expand on the site, but who knows what will happen if he gets the Republican nomination.

and:

The site launched January 10. A friend said it was on page 2 on January 14. It hit page 1 on January 16. Within a couple days it was up the 4th result, where it stayed for a while. I double checked the page 1 results with a couple friends on the internet to be sure.

Postscript: See Bing & Google: “Spreading Romney” Ranking Tops For “Romney” Is Normal for my follow-up story with a lengthy analysis of how freshness, some link gains an attention due to the “Maddow Factor” might be at work.

Related Articles

Postscript: There have been many updates to this story. See our Santorum’s Google Problem category for the latest articles.