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Barack Obama Gets a New Website

Democratic presidential candidate, Barack Obama, has a new web site, and it's likely that no one has even noticed.

By Michael Dorausch, D.C.

Democratic presidential candidate, Barack Obama, has a new web site, and it’s likely that no one has even noticed.

Barack Obama website 2008In September of 2007 I published an article (Barack Obama Presidential Campaign Website Success Secrets) that compared the websites of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Ron Paul. It’s now more than a year later and there’s been a significant amount of change occurring with presidential candidate web sites.

While not a typical key phrase that would bring traffic to a chiropractic web site, we began noticing an increase in web traffic for the term “www.obama.com” sometime during the summer of 2008. Traffic logs have showed the number of people visiting our site had been increasing month after month. Here’s why: The phrase “www.obama.com” was being indexed by search engines, and getting ranked in the top three or four results, when someone was searching for the term. I wouldn’t normally expect that it would bring much traffic, but in what was likely a disappointment to many, there was no Barack Obama web site at that URL. Instead, visitors were greeted with a page that was in Japanese, which had nothing to do with the presidential candidate. That’s recently changed.

I was looking at Web log files earlier today and I noticed we’re still getting visitors to the site for people performing www.obama.com searches. I’ve kept thinking to those searches are either going to increase in November or decrease in November but why in the world hasn’t someone from the Barack Obama team offered to buy that web site? It looks now like that deal has been done.

Up until just recently, if you performed a search on Google for www.obama.com, the top result would be the Japanese owned web site, followed by the Campaign Website Success Secrets article I mentioned above. I couldn’t help but thinking that the Barack Obama campaign has really been missing out by not purchasing (or at least negotiating some kind of deal for) the Obama.com web site. I don’t know when the change was made but today when you perform that same search you’ll get “Barack Obama Change We Need Welcome to Obama for America” as a title, and “Official Website of Barack Obama 2008 Presidential Campaign.” as the snippet for the #1 search result.

What does this all mean? What it means is someone finally got smart and set up a 301 redirect for that url. I don’t know how much search traffic that site has been getting, but I estimate it’s a lot. Now, people typing www.obama.com will get redirected to a my.barackobama.com page.

When you take a look at the Whois Record for Obama.com you can see that the current meta description tag reads: Official Website of Barack Obama 2008 Presidential Campaign. Interestingly, the IP address and Name Server information, has not changed. According to registrar information, the site was created in 2002 and it expires in April of 2010. It’s fairly common knowledge amongst domain name buyers that if you purchase a domain and change the IP address information and whois data, you may lose rankings (at least temporarily) for any current terms related to the domain.

Checking the Whois Record, the domain is still listed as being owned by Robert Roche in Oak Lawn, IL 60453. A bit of research brings up Oak Lawn Marketing, Inc. as the company most closely associated with Mr. Roche. Checking the Internet archive, the most recently archived obama.com page is from February of 2008. For those curious to see what the site looked like previously, here’s a link to the Internet Archive page.

Getting the site to redirect to its current location is a great move by the Barack Obama marketing team, it’s about time.

planetc1.com-news @ 10:21 am | Article ID: 1224609732

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