I received a piece of mail a few days ago — old fashioned, analog mail, that is. It was a bright yellow postcard from a local company that provides a service to homeowners. I don’t want to give their name away, but it’s three words: an adjective expressing a quality of service, followed by a noun (the thing they work on), and a noun based on the action they perform. Let’s say it was Best Floor Refinishers, just to make things easier.

So… Best Floor Refinishers sent me (“RESIDENT”) a postcard offering a $30 “off-season” discount rate. (Yes, I know floor refinishers don’t have an off season. The name is just an example. Pay attention.) The postcard also displayed the logo of some apparently authoritative national agency, implying that they have every right to use that “Best” (or something like that) in their company name. There was a toll-free telephone number, along with three other numbers for specific towns in the area: Cambridge, Needham, and Medford (say it with me: “Meffa”).

The postcard also contained a message addressed to “Dear Past Customer or Current Resident,” about the importance of refinishing my floors (or whatever) for safety’s sake. “BE SAFE, CALL TODAY!!” Moreover, I needn’t worry, because my “satisfaction is GUARANTEED !!!!!!”

Fascinating as all that may be, the thing that really caught my attention was right under the company’s name and logo: It was the word “Google” in a font very similar to Google’s own logo, but in all black letters, followed by a colon and the first two words of their company name, mashed together into one word and intercapped. Sort of like this:

Google:
BestFloor

OK, fine. I ran the search, and here’s what I got:

Well, no Google. I meant “BestFloor,” because that’s what the postcard said to search for.

At any rate, the top result for both [Best Floor] and [BestFloor] was the same site: bestfloor.com, which happens to be the site of Best Floor Refinishers. Pretty impressive, eh?

No! It’s not impressive at all. What are they trying to tell me — are they bragging that they rank #1 for the first two words of their company name? That they rule the SERP for their domain name? Wowzers.

I think they just wanted to let me know where to find their site, but rather than just telling me the URL, they tell me to search for the domain.

I’ve known plenty of people who navigated around the web this way. If they wanted to go to Qwerty’s Qoncepts and they knew the URL, they’d go to Google or Yahoo and search for qwertysqoncepts.com. This is what we in the search marketing business refer to with the technical term “stupid.”

It’s doubly stupid for a company to promote itself by telling people to search for its domain name, especially without the TLD. What would happen if their competitors over at bestfloor.net got to work on improving their site and took the top spot for [bestfloor]? Our postcard pals would be sending their potential customers straight to the other guys.

A word to the wise: if you want your print material to let people know where they can find your website, give them the damned URL. A one-step hunt for it is one step too many. At best it’s stupid. At worst, it’s an advert for the competition.

Oy, Google. Why do you do this to me?

I have a client who is very happy with the service I’ve provided him. Since I got started working on his site, he’s expanded the business considerably and still can’t keep up with all the customers he’s getting. He’s so happy, in fact, that he keeps telling me he doesn’t need me to do any more. He doesn’t even want me analyzing his traffic.

Now, I’m not going to waste my time having ClickTracks go through his log files just to satisfy my own curiosity, but now and then I’ll check up on some aspect of the site to see how it’s doing. Today, I was in Google Webmaster Tools, checking on a couple of sites and figured I’d have a quick peek at the data for this guy. When I went to look at his top clicked queries, I saw this:

See that on the first line? It says the site is #4 for searches on mouse. Just mouse. The single word. That’s number 4 out of a total of 261,000,000 results. There are 11,500,000 results for pages with the word “mouse” in their titles. I know I’m good at what I do, but damn, that’s good.

Obviously, I just had to go to the SERP and see what pages we’re sharing the top five with.

Just look at that: two pages from Wikipedia, and two from Apple. That’s some serious company to be in. But where’s my client’s site in this fancy-schmancy neighborhood? No, I didn’t cut off the image before his page’s listing. See those three pictures at the top of the results? The first one — the cute little mousie backed into a corner — that’s from my client’s site.

Damn you, Google! Don’t call that the number four result. It’s just a picture. Yes, the page on which it’s published is optimized pretty well for the word “mouse”. So put that at number four! So, people who want a picture of a mouse land on his page. Do they call him? Do they hire him? No! All they do is look at the picture, probably steal a copy of it, and make his server work a tiny bit harder than it ought to.

This is just unfair. It doesn’t give him business, and it doesn’t give me bragging rights. Universal search. Feh.

An old college chum of mine is a fairly well-known leftie political (and sex, religion and knitting) blogger. She also writes for Crooks and Liars, so yeah — she’s pretty big in that pond. About a week ago, she published a post announcing that she was joining a googlebomb associating the phrase “Liberal Fascism” (the title of Jonah Goldberg’s latest screed) with the word “fuckwad.”

Smarty-pants SEO that I am, I left the following comment on her post:

Sadly, googlebombs don’t work anymore. If they did, I’d be telling everyone to do this: lying sack of shit.

Anybody who follows these matters knows that Google modified their algorithm a year ago to diminish the chances of a googlebomb succeeding. Right?

Well, all I can say is that I’m glad I don’t have a hat, or I’d be eating it. In spite of the fact that, as liberals, their concerted effort wasn’t all that concerted — they didn’t all link to the same URL — it looks like they’ve pulled it off. Check out result #8 in the SERP below.

Go ahead. Take a look at the page and its source code. No sign of either “liberal” or “fascism” in there, much less the exact phrase. Have a look at the page’s backlinks — left-wing political blog after left-wing political blog.

Go figure.

Update, January 13

As of this morning, the Urban Dictionary page is at #1 for the search. However, someone has edited the page to include two instances of the keyword phrase, so sadly, it doesn’t really count as a bomb anymore.

I noticed today that someone came to my site recently via a Google search for [how to seo my site]. I’ve never checked that one before (and I sincerely doubt it’s ever brought me any business), so I ran the search myself, and found that my site is in fact number one, showing up before a couple of pages from Webmaster Guidelines. Pretty cool, apart from the fact that it’s a search just about nobody ever runs, and I’m not likely to ever earn a penny from any traffic it brings me.

Then I noticed something else about the SERP. Have a look:

Did you mean: how to use my site

Who do they think they’re fooling? Suddenly Google’s forgotten that “SEO” is a word? Sure, the acronym isn’t usually used as a verb, but I’ll bet more people are curious about how to seo a site than how to use one. After all, sites can be used in lots of different ways. The question is terribly unclear. You’d think that a search on [how to use my site] would bring up Did you mean: how to seo my site. It doesn’t.

I for one find this a bit insulting. I know Google doesn’t have the utmost respect for people in my line of work, but to pretend we don’t exist? That’s cold, Google.

Let’s look at Google’s competition. Maybe one or two of them will be more respectful.

• Ask has no problem with the query. In fact, they put a couple of videos about SEO in the right column, and a link to “Seo Tips” in the left.
• MSN doesn’t seem to be having any difficulty figuring out what the user is looking for.
• Yahoo has the gall to ask, “Did you mean: how to see my site.” Duh. People really ask that? You’re looking at a browser right now, genius.

Worst of all, my site doesn’t show up on any of the SERPs apart from nasty, disrespectful Google. So am I better off with an engine that ignores me, or one that recommends me while pretending I’m a typographical error?

No, I’m not talking about relationships between the company and any political figures. I just want to point out something I noticed regarding Google suggesting other searches when I look for information about a politician.

Let’s start with the names of the leaders of the two major parties in the US Senate:

• Harry Reid – Democratic Leader
• Dick Durbin – Democratic Whip
• Mitch McConnell – Republican Leader
• Trent Lott – Republican Whip

I was planning on writing a post that would serve to mock Mitch McConnell’s minuscule mouth, so I ran a search on his name and then clicked “Images”. What did I see? This:

Why is Google suggesting I try searches for Durbin and Lott? And why are they leaving out Reid, who is (at least officially) the most powerful of the four? I doubt it has anything to do with the relative size of their mouths — only McConnell’s is comically tiny.

If I run an image search for Harry Reid, Dick Durbin or Trent Lott, I don’t get a recommendation to look at other people. It’s as if Google is telling me to avoid looking at pictures of McConnell, which is totally unnecessary. I know he isn’t pretty, but I can handle it.

I was doing some research for a blog post earlier today. I needed to get some information on a member of Congress who’d officially come out as an atheist, so I ran a Google search for [atheist in congress]. Look what I got in the onebox:

It seems my mother has been speaking with Larry and Sergey. They’re all in cahoots, trying to get me a date even when I’m not looking for one. A word of advice: I’m not going to date someone all the way down in DC, even if she is an atheist. I’m sure there are plenty of perfectly nice atheists right here in Boston, so stick that in your algorithm and smoke it, Google.

Andy Beal points us to this video that suggests that Google may be using all the data it collects for… evil.

Yikes! This means that there may be a clone of qwerty at the Googleplex performing slave labor! And I’ll just bet that the clones there aren’t given access to all the great benefits they give the human googlers: free gourmet food, health care, daycare, massages, company stock, lava lamps… I guess “do no evil” doesn’t apply to artificially generated people.

Tags: Google, Search, Cloning