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Over Half of 2008 GOP Presediential Candidates Outranked by Wikipedia in Google for Own Name
March 07, 2007
Here and there The Wagon has been known to get political in its analysis, often to illustrate pols know not what they do on the internet. Today we have a new honey of a rankings scandal courtesy of techPresident:
In a recent survey, I found that Wikipedia has an expansive influence in organic Google search results for 2008 presidential candidates. For each candidate, their Wikipedia entry is ranked no lower than 5th place by Google. In addition, the Wikipedia entry ranks higher than the election web presence of that particular candidate for 25% of Democrats and 60% of Republicans.
Now first, lest the uninitiated, casual SEO observer not fully grasp the above search incompetence, it is quite difficult for a major brand not to rank first for its own brand name. You almost have to be doing something wrong at the site level, and most competent SEOs will be able to discover the reason for the glitch and remedy the error fairly quickly. The higher the brand recognition the greater the ease, if for no other reason than Google understands that a pure brand search will almost always signal an intent to find the brand site itself. Google's product is relevancy, as we like to say here.
Is there a more recognized brand on the techPresident list than America's Mayor, [Rudy Giuliani]? Yet at second he languishes, behind the Wikipedia entry replete with detailed analysis of the controversies not broached on the site he would like for you to rather visit instead.
The difference between these first and second positions? We know from the massive AOL search data leak that on that engine, at least, about half of all searchers click on #1 and south of 15% on #2, at least for the 20 million searches performed by 658,000 subscribers in that data sample.
If you are losing half of all searches on your brand that should be visiting your site uncontested, you should try and do something about it. Let's keep an eye on Rudy and see if he does.
All posts by John Lustina
posted by John Lustina at March 7, 2007 05:15 PM
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