Election-Trends: The Google Search Pollster

I’ve been noticing an increase in searches both for “obama terrorist” and “obama ayers”:

Google Searches for "obama ayers" and "obama terrorist"

So I decided to take a look at the handy-dandy geographic analyzer for these searches. Here are the top 10 U.S. cities that searched for “obama ayers” in the past 30 days:

1. Denver CO
2. Boston MA
3. Tampa FL
4. Orlando FL
5. Atlanta GA
6. Washington DC
7. Richardson TX
8. Houston TX
9. St. Louis MO
10. Dallas TX

It looks like Palin’s message is getting across nicely in Texas and Florida (Texas, as noted in a previous post, is also one of the hotbeds of searches for “obama muslim”).

For once, a barackobama.com Obama-Ayers fact check page is showing up in the top 30 on Google for this search (does anyone else find it hilarious that the filename is fact_check_on_clinton_attacks.php?). But the campaign could do so much better:

• A quickie HTML edit could improve the search engine rank and bring the page to the top 5 on Google: change the page <title> from the generic “Barack Obama and Joe Biden: The Change We Need” to “The Obama-Ayers Relationship: A Message from Barack Obama”
• The page should contain a statement from the candidate, not just quotes from newspapers (who are probably terrorist sympathizers themselves, after all.)

Somehow, this all seems so basic to me. But nobody ever said SEO was rocket science.