Google, Rick Santorum and the Politics of Ranking Signals

As the 2012 election begins to roll around it seems that Republican candidate Rick Santorum has fallen prey to Google Bomb (“using massive inbound links to a page (unrelated to the phrase and often done for satirical or even hurtful intentions—as with happened with ex-President George W Bush in the past) to rank http://spreadingsantorum.com/ (a site with a made-up sex-related phrase—the kind you’d normally find on UrbanDictionary.com) 1st in Google’s search results for the phrase “Rick Santorum. ”  Santorum has called on Google to “eliminate dirty search results connected to his name.” This apparently started in 2003 when LGBT rights activist and columnist Dan Savage threatened to begin associating the term Santorum with a sex-related phrase in response to Santorum’s anti-gay campaign.

It will be interesting to see what, if anything Google does.  They did modify their search results to remove the effect of the anti-Bush Google Bomb (the phrase “miserable failure” turned up the ex-President’s Whitehouse page).  But of course, this was a sitting President and that may have factored in to this decision.  There is also the question of Google going against its own signals.  At this point, the Google Bombed website has a PageRank of 5, over 32,000 inbound links, over 2,500 +1’s and over 26,000 Facebook likes.  These are the sort of signals that Google entrust it’s ranking algorithm to.  Does Google go back on this due to its intentional nature?  If so, how often will Google supersede its own ranking factors?

Read more at Search Engine Land: Should Rick Santorum’s “Google Problem” Be Fixed?

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