County
Risch Link On Bannock County Site
August 19, 2008 
Bannock County in Eastern Idaho has a new twist on helping voters. When you hit their ELECTION WEBSITE page and search for VOTER REGISTRATION or ABSENTEE BALLOT you don’t get either. Instead you get a sponsored link to Lt. Guv Jim Risch’s senate campaign site.
Nice work for Jim and staff, but hardly appropriate on an official county website. No doubt it is a case of the Risch staff being just a little smarter than the webmeister in Pocatello. Probably just a case of “running the county like a business.”
SCREENGRAB OF BANNOCK COUNTY SITE
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Comments & Discussion
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© 2008 Boise Guardian. 
Aug 19, 2008, 10:00 am
Lol. That’s a google add. The Risch staff uses them all the time. It’s more like google is smart and the county is trying to make money by selling ads.
EDITOR NOTE–We agree! Google will soon rule the world.
Aug 19, 2008, 11:52 am
Anyone in the State of Idaho wishing to Register to Vote can do so by going directly to: http://www.idahovotes.gov/
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A search of “Candidates” at the Bannock County site yields slightly better results.
Merely buying a “Sponsored Ad” is not enough. You’ve then gotta know what to do with it. Risch’s Team is clearly optimization savvy.
Aug 19, 2008, 9:52 pm
Google ads? Maaaaaybe. Look at your browser’s address field up top. You’re far from Bannock County… Yes, Google’s got a piece of it, but I wonder if Bannock County is even getting any revenue from those ads, or is it all part of Atomz’s service?
Aug 20, 2008, 12:03 pm
Atomz is a “free” search facility you can add to your website. They sell the ads, and make the money. Symbiosis of a sort. Does nothing for Bannock Co. other than giving them a semi-useless search facility.
The benefit to using Atomz is that it can work off an index of your site pages that you refresh a/r. Of course, if it returns one semi-relevant hit and 8 ad links, you might question the quality of the product.
Aug 20, 2008, 12:06 pm
Oh and do be sure to CLICK on the Risch ads any time you need to visit his campaign website. That way you can help share his wealth.
Aug 21, 2008, 7:15 am
I have not read the comments above, but I discovered that if you go to
http://www.obama.org
you will also find a Rish link buried in the middle of the page.
Has anyone contacted the canidate’s campaign about this attrosity?
Aug 21, 2008, 11:41 am
If obama.org really belongs to Barak Obama, I would seriously question his ability to govern. It looks to me like somebody registered the domain before he did, and is using it for nothing but ads, which ain’t kosher for .org domains. And yes, there is a Jim Risch ad there. At least no porno links yet.
Domain name speculators/squatters suck.
Aug 21, 2008, 3:25 pm
Agreed about the vacuum.