This afternoon some members of the PDF team set out to compare the websites for John Ewards, Dennis Kucinich, and Tom Vilsack -- the only formally announced candidates for president -- when we had a surprisingly hard time finding the Tom Vilsack for President website using Google, the world's leading search engine.

A quick Google search for the term "Tom Vilsack for President" turned up plenty of info on Vilsack, from bumper stickers and coffee mugs (the first hit!) to TomVilsack.com, the unofficial website for Vilsack for President, to a blog post titled, "Dumbass Democrat of the Day" from almost a year ago. But none of the results turned up Vilsack's actual campaign site, at www.tomvilsack08.com.

We did find it, however, looming large on the right side of the page, the sole link under the "Sponsored Links" section. This means the Vilsack team purchased Google Adwords to make sure their site showed up when people search for his name, which is the appropriate thing to do if you're, say, running a presidential campaign, but didn't seem to optimize it to show up in a Google search.

For the same search at Yahoo!, MSN's Live Search, and Amazon's A9, the campaign site was the first hit.

Attention team Vilsack: you need to fix this, pronto!

Tags: POTUS, tom vilsack

Stupid Net Tricks (Mistakes)
Joshua Levy's blog | email this page | delicious | digg | technorati