JoeBiden2020.info outranks Joe Biden’s exact-match .COM on Google, and it’s causing some problems

While I’m a big believer in owning your full name in .COM, if you’re running for political office, or a celebrity, owning it across a wider range of TLDs is probably a good idea.

If you don’t believe me, well then just do a Google search for something like “Joe Biden website” and you’ll see one of the top sites above the fold is JoeBiden2020.info which contains a pretty official looking site, with, uh, lots of photos and animated GIFs of Joe Biden getting a little too up close and personal with some people.

Couple this with the fact that Joe Biden’s own website actually doesn’t show up on the first page of Google and it shows how an exact match domain with some good SEO juice can be even more powerful than owning your exact-match .COM.

As you might imagine, Joe Biden does own JoeBiden.com and this is (from what I know at least) to be the main website for his campaign. Whoever built the site for him could brush up a bit on their SEO skills as you would think they should be able to get his exact-match .COM to outrank a .INFO domain, but they seem to have missed the mark for now.

Taking a look at the WHOIS data on DomainTools I can see that JoeBiden.com was registered back in 1997. JoeBiden2020.info, on the other hand, wasn’t registered until 2017, almost twenty years later.

For years there’s been an ongoing debate about whether domains will rank better if they were registered a long time ago. Google has put this one to rest multiple times, and this is another great example.

At the end of the day, the trick here seems to be really good SEO because someone is outranking a 22 year-old exact-match .COM with a three year old, .INFO.

My guess is Joe Biden’s team is probably scrambling to find some SEO help and we’ll likely see him back up on the top of Google when you search for him, but for now, JoeBiden2020.info is likely getting a lot of traffic, and they’re certainly getting plenty of publicity a I first read about it in this article on CNBC.

Of course, the detective in me couldn’t help but to do a little research into who owns this domain. Here’s what I was able to figure out:

  • the domain is registered under the email elizabeth@goldstandardgroup.com
  • going back in time I was able a woman named Elizabeth Riegal from Worldwide Corporation in Clearlake Park
  • this is likely the same owner since Clearlake Park also shows up in the registration info for JoeBiden2020.info
  • WorldWideCorporation.com has been under privacy protection since 2018, so I went back to 2017
  • That’s where the trail goes cold. While I could spent a lot more time researching this, I’m not going to, it’s pretty clear the owners don’t want to be found as they’ve hidden their identity across a slew of domains

If anyone else does more research than me and can figure out who put up the site, feel free to share in the comment section below. For now, SEO’s around the world are waiting to hear from the Biden team, who definitely needs some help right now because what you currently find on Google is the exact opposite of what they want people to see.

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton