On July 18, the Media Research Center posted this message on Twitter.
I checked it out and sure enough, when you Google “Trump 2024” (not even “Trump Presidential Race 2024” as they say to do in their Tweet) you get the following for the first nine organic results.
When you Google “Biden 2024”, here’s what you get.
As the Media Research Center correctly noted, the #2 result here is Biden’s campaign Web site joebiden.com, while Donald Trump’s campaign Web site doesn’t appear at all under searches for “Trump 2024”.
First of all, yes, there is Google Bias overall
I’ve already covered in my posts about Google bias why Google front-loads results with news outlets like The New York Times, CBS News, Wikipedia, NBC News, and Politico. It’s because Google, in its partnership with organizations like NewsGuard, has white-listed these as “authoritative” and “trustworthy”.
Anyone who claims that these outlets are fair and objective need look no further than the first thing you see when you click on the New York Times search result.
Read each candidate’s intro. Biden is a “protector of democracy and a stabilizing force after the upheaval of the Trump Administration”. Trump “denied losing to the point of incident a mob of his supporters” (everyone, of course, remembers those incendiary words he spoke: “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”)
Like I said, I’ve already covered this bias in past posts.
But I wanted to take this post to examine the newest claim by the Media Research Center. For those who are new to this site, I’m an SEO professional of over 20 years and have worked on some of the largest corporate Web sites. So I know a thing or two about SEO.
Did Google actively censor Donald Trump’s Web site and boost Joe Biden’s Web site?
The answer to this question is a little more complicated than you might think.
Let’s start with the obvious:
1. Yes, there is circumstantial evidence of Google’s fingers on the scales via their algorithm
On Election Day 2020, JoeBiden.com brought in 157% more organic traffic than DonaldJTrump.com, representing 58% more value
According to the SEO tool SEMRush, in November 2020, JoeBiden.Com ranked for 93,717 keywords. The value of this SEO traffic was $5.7 million.
During the same month, DonaldJTrump.Com ranked on 36,487 keywords. The value of this SEO traffic was $3.6 million.
I should explain how SEMRush calculates the value of organic search traffic (which of course a company doesn’t pay Google for). It takes the keyword that a site is ranking on organically and calculates the amount of money it would take to purchase the equivalent visibility in Google paid search.
Why was the traffic to JoeBiden.com worth more than the traffic to DonaldJTrump.com? Simply put, here were some of the keywords that Joe Biden’s Web site ranked for during that time:
- Immigration – ranked #8 on Google
- Black men – #8
- Gun control – #4
- Economic recovery – #9
- Economy reopen – #5
Contract this to Donald Trump’s Web site, which only ranked for “branded” terms that had Trump’s name in it (“donald trump”, “trump rally schedule”, “trump news”, etc.)
In other words, Joe Biden’s site was ranking on far more highly competitive keywords—not just keywords that voters who searched his name (and thus were already likely to vote for him) would find, but keywords that undecided voters might search when deciding whom to vote for.
Yes, looking back at the Trump Web site as it appeared on November 3, 2020, there was some room for improvement. But they had a good amount of content.
It’s well documented now that Google actively whitelisted domains: in a Google leak, it was revealed that Google literally had a module called IsElectionAuthority. Publicly, Google’s stance was that this was to prevent “misinformation”. But as we’ve seen in past posts, they likely put outlets like The New York Times and CNN into this whitelist, while omitting every media outlet—left and right—that fell outside of the mainstream.
Because there is a distinct left-leaning bias among most mainstream media, JoeBiden.com naturally benefitted from the manipulation that Google did to its search algorithm.
2. JoeBiden.com is being given special treatment
Whoever does the coding for JoeBiden.com made a colossally boneheaded error. As of July 19, 2024, here’s what you see when you look at their home page source code.
In layman’s terms, this line of code, called a “canonical tag” is instructing Google to ignore the English version of JoeBiden.com and instead of index its Spanish-language content. It’s a coding error.
Someone at Google clearly took measures to override its standard practice to ignore this canonical tag and to continue to index the main, English content on JoeBiden.com.
I’m not saying that there’s necessarily a conspiracy here: Google often “looks the other way” and compensates for errors when notable sites and big brand sites make technical SEO mistakes.
But it does beg the question—would donaldjtrump.com be afforded the same courtesy?
3. All that said, there are way too many unforced errors on DonaldJTrump.com
One problem with donaldjtrump.com is that it makes far too many SEO mistakes. Yes, the deck is certainly stacked against them, but there are also technical errors they’re making that play right into the hands of those within Google who don’t want him to get his message out.
If anyone reading this knows anyone on the Trump Campaign, please feel free to forward this site to them, as it’ll contain some SEO advice they can use to squeeze a little more SEO visibility.
Here’s a list of immediate things that the Trump campaign can do to fix things. I’m not saying they’re suddenly going to see their site rank highly for all the keywords they want. But at the very least, if they put their best foot forward they might enjoy some greater visibility from Google, other search engines like Bing and DuckDuckGo, and generally make their site easier for people to find and share.
a. Add descriptive Title Tags
Title Tags are one of the most important places for a site to inform users and search engines what to expect to find on any given page. Currently, the home page of donaldjtrump.com reads:Home | Donald J. Trump
This Title Tags (as well as others like “Platform” and “News”) simply aren’t descriptive enough.
Contrast this with the Biden campaign’s home page title tag which reads “Joe Biden for President: Official Campaign Website”. This gives search engines (and users) a lot more context about what the site is about than the word “Home”. Google is more likely to serve up Biden’s page for user searches that contain phrases like “President” and “Campaign”.
The lack of title tag optimization is even more stark when you drill down to the “News” page. On their News page, you see Title Tags like “Palm Beach Playbook” and “ICYMI: Truth from President Donald J. Trump”. These title tags don’t describe what a reader will find on the underlying page, which prevents search engines from taking them very seriously.
b. Make the cross-posts from Truth Social indexable
While I’m on the subject, let’s look at pages like this under the News section.
The Trump Campaign team was wise to cross-post Trump’s posts from Truth Social onto their Web site to give it further reach (leaving it to independent fans to do the same on social networks like X).
Where they dropped the ball is that they posted a screenshot of Trump’s post, and didn’t copy and paste the actual text itself.
Copy inside of images is invisible to Google, so Google’s crawler doesn’t see any of the text here. Trump’s team would be better off to do the following:
- Copy and paste the actual text from Truth Social onto this page
- Add some commentary providing more context around why, where, and when Trump posted this
- Add a title tag and a headline (H1) that summarizes the content of the post. For example,
President Trump's Phone Call With Volodymyr Zelenskyy on July 19, 2024 | Donald J. Trump
Similarly, on their Platform page, they link to a PDF for people to read more details about Trump’s policy positions. No one is going to click on and download a PDF. You’ll get much more visibility and reach if you create separate HTML pages for each of Trump’s campaign positions and link to them from this page. Even better if instead of just copying and pasting from a PDF you can provide more commentary and context. Trump’s 2016 site did a much better job at this than the current site does.
On a side note, if anyone reading this knows someone at Truth Social, they have the same unforced error with Title Tags which is absolutely impeding them from showing up in SEO (or rather, becoming so prominent in organic search that Google has to act)
c. Fix your 301 redirects from legacy domains
When I type “donaldtrump.com” into my browser, a 302 redirect is sent from that domain to the official domain donaldjtrump.com.
To Google’s crawler, a 302 redirect doesn’t pass any link authority from the originating domain to the destination.
There are thousands of links going to donaldtrump.com which the Trump team is not capitalizing on. The Trump team is missing a huge opportunity to have those links “count” towards its official Web site.
Same goes for redirects from http: to https: versions of your site.
d. Restore your legacy content
When the Trump team resumed this site for the 2024 campaign it wiped out the legacy content from the 2016 and 2020 campaigns.
While there’s a certain wisdom to starting fresh, the best way to counter Google’s manipulation of head terms (short phrases like “immigration” and “gun control”) is to go for long-tail searches (detailed phrases like “what is donald trump’s position on gun control”).
The way to rank on long-tail search is with more content. Much more content. Trump’s old site had a lot of it, and that content had a lot of links coming to it. Wiping it all out was a huge mistake for their SEO.
e. Make your site a destination site, not just a transactional site
Your site focuses on transactions. Here’s where you donate. Here’s where you buy tickets. Here’s where you shop.
If you want your site to take off—and don’t want to rely on Google—make it a destination site.
For starters, on your Events page, it’s great that you announce upcoming events and offer tickets. But the vast majority of your users coming to this page aren’t going to be able to come to your event. Why not have links to your Rumble account or an embedded video where users can watch the Rally?
When you give reasons for someone to come to your site, come back to your site, and invite others to come to your site, you increase the number of links and mentions. This not only helps your SEO, more importantly, it bypasses Google as the middleman.
Conclusion
These five “tips” are just off the top of my head from a very cursory review of donaldjtrump.com. Do I believe that if the Trump Team fixes all of these, they will instantly rank on top of Google again? Of course not.
As we’ve seen, Google employees in 2016 were distraught at the thought that Google helped Donald Trump win. Donald Trump won simply because he came off as more authentic and more genuine than Hillary Clinton, and back when Google was more unbiased, that reality came through. But in the eyes of Google’s employees, something nefarious must have happened. Russia was involved. No, right-wing extremists somehow compromised Google’s algorithm. And so they broke Google in order to “make things right”.
But I see lots of people on X decrying how Google is keeping the Trump site down. While I do believe that to be true in a broader sense, until the Trump Team corrects these and other very basic SEO errors, Google can simply hide behind the statement that donaldjtrump.com is underperforming because it is poorly optimized—and they’d technically be correct.
If the Trump team corrects these errors (and there are more…they’re welcome to reach out to me at seoatdeplorables (at) gmail.com for more advice) and Google still doesn’t give them visibility, that will be more incriminating evidence.
