Exclusive: 15 of 18 Presidential Candidates Have Negative Search Listings

Thursday, June 28th, 2007 by Andy Beal

Exclusive: 15 of 18 Presidential Candidates Have Negative Search Listings

With 16 months until the 2008 Presidential election, we thought it would be interesting to conduct a study of the search engine reputation of current candidates. We examined the first 20 results on Google and Yahoo for the ten Republicans and eight Democrats to see who had the best and worst online reputation.

The results were startling, with only three candidates fully in control of their search engine reputation. Who were they? How did Hillary and Barack fair?

I won’t spoil the surprise, so head over to the 2008 Presidential Election Candidate Reputation Study for the breakdown.

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5 comments on “Exclusive: 15 of 18 Presidential Candidates Have Negative Search Listings”

SEO Refugee Blog Says:

June 28th, 2007 at 9:53 am

You left out Fred Thompson. I realize he’s not “officially” declared (I think that will come next week) but he might as well have. He does very well in the SERPs and a good chunk of that is because of his acting career.
Andy Beal Says:

June 28th, 2007 at 10:11 am

@SEO refugee - yeah we left him out of the results because he hasn’t declared, but did look at his reputation. Over Google and Yahoo’s top 20 (40 results) he had 11 positive, 1 negative and 28 mixed. One of the better reputations.
Fitness guy Says:

June 28th, 2007 at 4:03 pm

I can’t believe that SEO is not one (if not the highest) of their budget priorities. Maybe they are not aware of how long it takes to effect search engine ratings and are waiting for a big push as the election gets closer. Which we all know will be disastrous.
Gilmore gains positive approval on the net » wenBLOG Says:

June 28th, 2007 at 6:28 pm

[...] Interesting bit of information about how candidates in the 2008 presidential race are faring on the internet.Â Â A study by the marketing and blogging consultancy Marketing Pilgrim found that the 15 out of 18 presidential candidates have majority negative search engine listings associated with their campaigns. [...]
Jonathan Mendez Says:

June 29th, 2007 at 12:59 pm

Great study Andy.

This week I also did a scorecard for the candidates on the SERPs but in AdWords. My results are here:

http://www.optimizeandprophesize.com/jonathan_mendezs_blog/2007/06/the -search-engi.html

Your work highlights even more the need for candidates to improve Paid Search efforts.

Cheers,

Jonathan

Marketing Pilgrim