Democracy Candidate
I started an open-source platform for posting candidate profiles to give interested voters a search result for their local races. The source and contribution guidelines are available here. The site itself is available here. Additionally, and absolutely relevant— I am running for one of my Chicago suburb's open positions in Lake Park School Board District 108, and my profile on that site is available here.
Over the course of developing a campaign site I rediscovered a lost love of graphic design. I've always fancied myself something of a jack-of-all-trades, and when it came to web design that has historically meant designing things myself wherever a template wouldn't do. I've always especially enjoyed logo work, probably because my art training never got past the 100 level teaching of 'everything is a shape', and logos tend to literally rely on being easily scaled circles and squares. I also had to find a way for the themes to carry over a general platform, as well as personal pages and even some print design work. This has been a really fun set of challenges to overcome, and I'm considering donating design time to local efforts just to keep it going.
The idea for the site came from a personal place for me. Bigger state-level races with party affiliations tend to have a variety of resources and full campaign sites, but local races rarely do, and as somebody who has always tried to do a bit of research on candidates up and down the ballot I've found that frustrating. I wanted to offer an opportunity for candidates from any race to easily provide a bio and a bit of insight about themselves so that people can easily search and find info about them without having a direct connection. Once I decided to become a candidate in a local race I found the motivation to put it all together.
Initially I registered the domain, published the site with Hugo helping me with SEO, and then submit it to the usual search engine tools. After a few weeks of getting penalized for being a new domain things started to list out in search results. Searching 'Zachary Cook Lake Park 108' listed democracy candidate as the first result on every major search engine, and for Google I even got a nifty AI summary encouraging people to vote for me. I shared my results with some community organizers and encouraged them to send me candidate profiles if they liked the platform, and I was feeling really good about how things were going until today.
Today when I went to add some new candidate profiles and did a quick search result test to find that Google has removed all results to the site. Their admin tools show it as indexed, and actually if you do a search using site:democracycandidate.us you still see every page result, but no contextual results are showing. My best guess is that the site got picked up by some particularly annoying spammy backlink sites and that has lowered the legitimacy rating of the site in Google's algorithms. The results still show fine in Bing and DuckDuckGo, probably thanks to their participation in IndexNow and my participation in that program thanks to CloudFlare.
Generating good legitimate backlinks for new sites is one of the hardest things to do. Social Media and other community driven content generally don't even register because of how easy it is for bad actors to flood them with junk links. All the joy I had over rediscovering design has been removed by rediscovering how much I absolutely hate SEO. Hey, at least it's not as bad as dealing with marketing email delivery.
To help the problem one of the best things I can do is link to it in a blog post from this long established and trusted domain of mine. If you're reading this and you have a site of your own, consider linking to any area or candidate profile of Democracy Candidate that you support. If you have a candidate you like in a local race then help them publish a bio, especially if their content isn't redundant to other sites online. I would guess having a handful of candidates with duplicated copy from other mediums makes the site look like an automated aggregator when that is not the case. Help me prove to the algorithms this is legitimate content that helps voters learn about who is running in their local races.
Thank you!