Uncle Joe & SEO

Googling around about candidates in the 2020 race, and I discovered an odd and unfortunate thing. If you Google “Biden 2020” and scroll down, looking for his campaign site…

Ah, yes, Joe Biden for President 2020. That looks like the right one, let’s see…

While the content is terribly embarrassing for Joe Biden, what’s more embarrassing is that this site came up before his actual campaign site. An ad to donate to his campaign appears at the top of several search engine result pages (SERPs), but nowhere does his actual campaign page appear.

This is all due to how these pages are launched and how they interact with search engines. Once your site is launched, it can take anywhere from a few days to a month for search engines to crawl and categorize it, resulting in downtime between the launch of the site and when it can be seen by your customers. Political campaigns suffer here – they want to have a big launch, but because they build hype around a launch event, they don’t release a site until after the event itself. This leaves a gap of time where new supporters will have trouble accessing content on the site, such as donation pages and email signups.

You can prevent this by submitting your page to Google – it should become listed more quickly.

In the meanwhile, we get this site – a prankster website that’s getting free exposure from Joe Biden’s run. Biden’s campaign website will eventually be listed and should push this one off the front page of results, but until then, we have this…

UPDATE: This joke site was picked up by a few major news outlets after we published this blog. I don’t think anyone saw it here because we hadn’t officially launched the blog yet – but it does demonstrate the impact of not having your site listed in search engine results.