Senator Hutchinson’s Site Keyword Dump

I am a Texas girl. Born and raised.

I am a liberal for the most part. I vote fairly regularly. But I really don’t get into the depths of politics.

That is until it meets the SEO world. And today it did. I got a call from the Austin American Statesman wanting to know my opinion on a site supposedly put up by the Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson campaign called http://www.standbykay.com

My first reaction? No redirect from non-www to www (Kay, if you need any help with SEO let me know). Pretty site though.

Then I looked at what I was called about: the source code. The next words out of my mouth were “Woah. Oh my lord. Wow.” (Yes, that was the quote.)

What did I see, but a normal header, some javascript, and then a list of 2241 random keywords centered around Texas and politics. Just a huge list. Dumped in the top of the page. And hidden. The CSS is:

#Layer1 {
	position:absolute;
	left:0px;
	top:0px;
	width:100%;
	z-index:1;
	visibility: hidden;}

Then again on the line:

<div id="Layer1" style="display:none;">

Yeah. I say again. Wow.

I figured it was a) Spam Attack b) stupid SEO. When discussed with a friend (@whoisgregg), he noted it might be a demo site by the hosting company. But …

The campaign is now saying it’ll be removed. It is their site. Needless to say someone is getting fired. Not sure who did this, but really? How stupid can you be?

For anyone launching a site … never make it live until it’s passed through the company(or organization) and your friendly neighborhood SEO. Sorry, I love web design companies, hosting companies, they all make the interwebz a prettier place. But trust SEO to the professionals. Especially when you are deal with something as hot as politics, you have to be clean.

Update

From the article:

Sadosky and other campaign aides said this afternoon that only the two phrases using “rick perry gay” will be removed because they won’t play into the campaign’s future messages.Broadly, the campaign said a vendor sold them on a tool that generates the phrases hourly or less in an attempt to divine the most frequent Web searches made by individuals who search online using one or all of the terms “Rick Perry,” “Kay Bailey Hutchison” and “Texas.”

Punch line: The generated phrases aren’t intended to drive up traffic to the standbykay site; they are intended to help Hutchison’s campaign decide most efficiently where to purchase banner ads or other Web-related advertisign that would drive people to the site, where visitors can volunteer, chase information or make donations.

My response to the Statesman (and hopefully the campaign reads it):

There is no reason for them to hide keywords such as “name xls” and “debachary definition,” much less any other keyword in that site. The company that is recommending hidden text to determine “efficiently where to purchase banner ads or other Web-related advertisign that would drive people to the site, where visitors can volunteer, chase information or make donations” is one that does not understand websites or how the search engines work.

A reputable company would have recommended a paid campaign to test keywords or content around the keywords to test it’s relevancy. Hidden text holds no value to their campaign or website and can potentially hurt the site in the future.