Tamar Political Search Index finds party leaders failing to fully protect their online reputations

While the UK political parties prepare to battle for voters hearts and minds in the coming General Election, new research shows that the leaders in Conservative and Labour parties are failing to fully protect their online reputations.

Core Facts

Tamar, the leading UK natural search conversion agency, has announced the results of its second Political Search Index, which highlights potentially damaging oversights in management of the personal brands of Gordon Brown and David Cameron as well as other high-profile party figures.
Tamar research has tracked the reputation management of leading political figures over the past two months to determine how successful they are at positioning themselves positively online. Tamar monitored Google rankings, as well as volume of search, on leadership names.
Its findings indicate that unofficial and highly negative websites bearing the names of the Conservative and Labour leaders (www.davidcameron.com; www.gordonbrown.com) consistently rank high on the first page of Google for people seeking information on them.
The two party leaders have also not moved to protect their personal brands by opening a Twitter account in their names, which could be costly in terms of reputation or positive engagement with voters, as the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alastair Darling has found. An account has been opened on Twitter in his name that ranks highly on the first page of Google search.
While the Conservative Party has the @Conservatives Twitter account and Gordon Browns official office is represented with @DowningStreet, neither rank highly in Google searches for the personalities themselves.
The Liberal Democrats and the Greens have moved more quickly on Twitter, with Nick Clegg, the Lib Dem leader holding an account and the Greens Caroline Lucas joining in November, although neither is highly visible on Google searches.
In George Osbornes case, the Shadow Chancellor had relevant and controlled information about himself on the www.georgeosborne.co.uk website. This ranked very highly on Google search returns pages when checked in October but in November the site had slipped down the rankings and was returning a 404 not found result. Then, a redirect was inserted into the page that pushed the site off the rankings (removed due to duplicate content). While the site is live, showing official information about the politician, it is not ranking at all on the search engine. While a direct search for the address produces a correct result the changes reflect poor SEO practice and effectively killed off a very positive personal brand development.
The Liberal Democrats and the Green Party leadership, in contrast, appear to have full control over their personal brands. Official sites for Nick Clegg, the Lib Dem leader, and the Greens Caroline Lucas rank consistently at the top of the Google searches. The Greens leader also has a Facebook page that ranks in the top ten on the search returns.

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With the next general election being fought online as well as offline, all parties need to work on the detail of their leadership reputation management, minimising the slanderous and negative views. Weve seen that Gordon Brown, for example, attracts around 400,000 searches a month on Google and around 30,000 of those people searching will see the unofficial sites. With the explosion of real-time search recently, its even more important for the political parties to take both factual and social search seriously. Simple actions such as registering the names of key figures, opening Facebook accounts and engaging on Twitter would make a big difference.

Neil Jackson, Director of Search, Tamar