Angry in the Great White North

Check it out: Right From Alberta wrote this up six hours ago.  My post is old news.

A quick primer might be necessary.  When you type in a search term in the Google search engine, Google serves up two distinct lists of hits.  The one most people are familiar with are the organic hits.  These are the hits Google serves based on how closely the page matches the the search term as calculated by Google's top secret algorithms.

The other list are the so-called Sponsored Links.  These are sites from customers who pay through the AdWords program.   That program allows site owners to bid on terms.  If the term is typed into the Google search box, Google checks for the high bidders, and those sites are listed in Sponsored Links section.

Now look at the search results page served up when I type "stephane dion":

Click to enlarge the screen grab.  Now look to the right.  The top bid for the search term "stephane dion" is JackLayton.ca, which redirects to the main NDP website.

Very clever.  Not only is the NDP ignoring Stephane Dion and the Liberals on the campaign trail, the NDP is outbidding the Liberals on keyword search bids, bringing people looking for information on "stephane dion" to their website.

Look, this won't win the election.  But owning your own search terms is considered pretty important in this field.  Letting your competitors grab traffic that was heading for your site based on a search of your own product's name is the sort of thing that makes people in this business snicker.

Update:  And those rotten Dippers are grabbing Conservative traffic too!  Type in "stephen harper" and there is JackLayton.ca in the sponsored links.  Clever little Dippers.