Rick Santorum has a problem with Google: if you search for his name, some less-than-desirable results appear. A web site owner has been working to redefine “Santorum” because of some things Rick Santorum said. Santorum has reportedly asked Google to remove the site from the search results, but Google has denied his request.
It’s easy to sympathize with Santorum on this. Who among us would want to have this problem? Certainly not me. That brings the question of whether or not Google should honor his request, and no, they should not. Here’s why:
First, as much as Santorum would hate to admit it, the attempt to redefine his last name has been rather successful. The offending site is first in the search results for “Santorum” on Google, Yahoo, and Bing. The new definition has found its way into Urban Dictionary as well. If people are searching Santorum in the context of its new definition, Google would be sacrificing quality to send them to Rick Santorum’s web site.
Google should also not interfere because the offending webmaster got his site to the top of the search results the proper way. I’ve had some good experience with SEO (search engine optimization), and I can assure you that outranking a Senator’s web site for searches of his name is no easy task. There are unscrupulous ways to rank well, but those methods typically violate Google’s webmaster guidelines. (Violating the webmaster guidelines can get your site completely banned from Google’s search index.) If Google were to penalize him, they would be telling webmasters that their list of guidelines is meaningless and the quality of the Google index would suffer.
Of course, none of this makes Santorum very happy. He has been speculating that Google would have removed the links if he were a Democrat but since he’s a Republican, they choose to leave it alone. He has also been on the attack against the search company saying that Google is spreading ‘filth’ through its web site. The truth is that Google is showing web content that its algorithm has determined to be relevant to the search.
This is not a unique situation, and there is a straightforward way of resolving the issue. While this type of issue is not common in politics, companies have been dealing with internet PR issues like this for some time. A customer gets upset, launches a web site, outranks the real web site, causes a PR nightmare, and suddenly has the undivided attention of the company. There are two ways to solve this problem.
- Buy the site. All Santorum has to do is buy the guy’s site from him. This issue is a big enough problem for Santorum that the web site would command a healthy sum, but it’s probably worth that amount to make this issue disappear quickly and permanently. Santorum spinning his wheels yelling at Google is just making the problem worse.
- Call in the professionals. Santorum could bring in a top tier SEO consultant (which will also not be cheap). Odds are good that a consultant would recommend trying to buy the offending site first, but if that didn’t work, good SEO knowledge would certainly help.
There’s a clear way out of this mess for Santorum, but as long as he is yelling at Google and causing a scene, the problem is going to get worse, and the harder it will be for him to make “Santorum” be anything but a politician.
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