Political Parties and SEO

Who would have guessed that if you look at the number of backlinks each of the four big UK parties have (Labour, Conservative, Lib Dems and Greens) the Liberal Democrats are first past the post with a staggering 8,000 estimated (by Google) links.

The numbers reported by Google (and Yahoo in brackets) are

• Green Party - 2,000 (93,000)
• Conservative - 4,940 (323,000)
• Labour Party - 5,290 (297,000)
• Liberal Democrats - 8,000 (445,000)

All four sites have a PageRank of 7 except for the Green Party who have a PR6. All four sites are using Google Analytics. And all four sites registered their domains around 1996/1997. This is where the similarities seem to end. The Lib Dem website stands out not only by the number of inbound links but also by their decision to use frames across the site. Could this be the reason why today the cached version of their homepage is 4 days old, whereas the other 3 sites have been updated today?

Apart from the title tag, most of the four sites have missing description or keyword tags. One tag which is present on the Liberal Democrat's website is

<meta name="ICBM" content="51.49731, -0.12735" />

This is a geo-tagging meta-tag whose name is derived from the cold war's intercontinental ballistic missile era specifying the geographic co-ordinates of a target, is this asking for trouble? Or are they using the co-ordinates for a UK-wide mapping application of all their regional headquarters?

And finally, the Green Party website is built on an open source CMS system called Modx, which seems to be dealing with the SEO aspects of their site rather well. Definately one to download and try out.

You can find all the four party's websites here
The Labour Party
The Conservative Party
The Liberal Democrat Party
The Green Party