I’m taking care of a friend’s cats while he’s out of town. While I was leaving his apartment, a stink bug flew at me and attacked with extreme prejudice and unmitigated ferocity. OK, I’ll admit that it was probably just trying to find someplace to land peacefully, but my head is not as bug-friendly as it may look.

I began flailing my arms about in desperate defense, ultimately relying on the plastic bag in my hand as a weapon against this cruel stink bug berserker. You may remember that I am taking care of cats. The plastic bag, which I was taking to the dumpster, was not empty.

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Back to work after Mother’s Day, it hit me. Does Google = Mom?

You decide for yourself. Choose the most appropriate response for each question below:

1. Establishes and subtly enforces — to keep things in order — a system of reward and discipline for a set of known rules:

a) Google
b) Mom

2. Establishes and subtly enforces a second system of reward and discipline, this one for which the rules are not disclosed:

a) Google
b) Mom

3. Encourages — through a complex strategy of intermittent delayed reward for compliant behavior — the habit of always trying to do everything right to be sure she’s happy:

a) Google
b) Mom

4. Occasionally must take away everyone’s privileges when actually only a few have been bad:

a) Google
b) Mom

5.Works tirelessly to survey, decode, categorize, store, and retrieve stuff — on demand and usually in under two seconds — so most of the time we can get what we need or something pretty darn close:

a) Google
b) Mom

6. Has earned the cultural endorsement of having a noun that names them be also used as a verb:

a) Google
b) Mother

7. Fill in the blank: “If ___________ ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.”

a) Google
b) Momma

Am I on to something here?

Have you seen this yet? Interestingly enough, the number of raw searches was up on Yahoo! and Microsoft even though their percentage of the market fell.

The Google toolbar (and others!) is a favorite internet marketing tool of mine. It may not seem like a marketing “tool� to everybody, but when I spend time researching on behalf of a client, Google toolbar is front and center. So, I thought I’d let you in on a most-used trick: searching a site, even if there isn’t a search window on the site.

To begin with, download the Google toolbar (not just the little search window that’s installed in various toolbars) from toolbar.google.com.

Let’s say you Google a word, get a bunch of results and then don’t find the term you were searching for on a particular site that was returned as a result. There’s a little icon available on the Google toolbar that looks like Mr. Magoo (for those of us old enough to remember him!)–or maybe it’s a magnifying glass with spectacles. I have no idea what it’s supposed to be, but it sure is a handy little guy.

(Yahoo toolbar has a similar function available via the “Search Web� drop-down menu.) This function allows you to search for a term “only on the current website.� If it’s not showing on your Google toolbar, right click a blank area of the toolbar and select “customize.� You’ll be able to click/drag the icon onto your toolbar.

So, for example, when I’m researching a particular search phrase for a client’s organic SEO project, I use Mr. Magoo on the various (mostly competitor) sites and get a feel for how they’re using the term. You can check your own web pages to see if your copy is reflecting the search terms that are important to you.

Enjoy this Mr. Magoo search-in-a-search trick. Actually, you can use it from any site without doing a search first…as long as you have the toolbar open.

A media consultant friend used to have this sign taped to his office wall: “Never Do This.”

Below it were newspaper clippings of unfortunate things public people had said. An oil company PR person saying: “Only four hundred thousand gallons of oil was spilled and it wasn’t all ours.” An elected official defending allegations of violating a particular law, saying: “Uh, that’s not a LAW. It’s just a STATUTE.” At our SEO agency, we call it “Worst Practices.”

Last week, doing some competitive snooping for a client, I was at cache:www.competitorwebsite.com for the search engine view. It was the same as the competitor’s homepage – as it should be – with the Google cache box across the top. I scrolled all the way to the bottom, in my meticulous way, no surprises.

Then I clicked for the text-only version. Just what you’d expect – no images, same words. I scrolled to the bottom – oh my.

There, below the footer text, were several hundred words of hidden copy. About eight more seconds of detective work revealed the copy’s formatting code, the css class “se,� designated the right size, color, and presentation to be invisible to a human yet still be indexed by the search engines.

This is bad. If this were ok, web searching would be like ordering the fish at a restaurant that says you can order anything, but really everyone in the kitchen is having a fist fight to see who gets to come out to your table to take your order. The strongest and possibly meanest – or most desperate or corrupt – wins the fight and comes to your table. You’d say: “Could I have the daily fish special?” And she’d say sure, which one do you want: we have fish Brittany Spears, fish steroids, fish nudity, and low cost prescription medications with fish.

If you were patient, or terribly hungry, rather than running out the front door you might say “I asked for the fish special: I’ll have the salmon.” And she’d nod, and say sure, which one do you want: we have salmon low interest credit cards, salmon diet cure, salmon vitamins, salmon product coupons, and online matchmaking with salmon.

Vitriol aside, I was having a great time doing the email equivalent of popping in to everyone’s office and saying “Look at me at this, isn’t it amazing?” Our CEO then asks if that hidden text is on any of the other pages. I rush to view: source. Yes, it is. There is duplicate hidden duplicate copy on multiple pages.

Some of you already are sharing the satisfied elegance of justice, and for those not there yet, the punch line is: search engines despise duplicate text. When it’s found – and it’s easy for an automated process to find – your website gets penalized – those pages aren’t shown. SEO cheaters can be removed from the ranking results, aka de-listed.

So this website, while decently sized and showing signs of some ethical optimization, is nearly invisible to people searching. Whether a Google or Yahoo human picked up on the hidden text, or the automated process detected the collateral damage of the duplicate text, this site is suffering the consequences of its unethical SEO. We regrettably, and with a grimace of disgust, award this site top tier recognition in our gallery of Worst Practices.

Driving to errands after work, a story came onto NPR’s Marketplace that was so riveting I sat in my parked car, little heart all aflutter with hope at what I was hearing. See, Microsoft is attempting a hostile takeover of Yahoo! That’s not the fun part, though. Yahoo! is trying to rally by paring down to doing what they do well and outsourcing what they don’t do so well. Namely, search.

That’s right–the execs got together over the weekend to discuss Yahoo! outsourcing their search and paid search to Google. It’s like a Valentine’s Day gift from the universe to search marketers.

Okay, that’s probably not nice of me, but I have a major problem with Yahoo! putting paid results in with the natural ones and not differentiating them. Not PPC ads, but an additional service called Yahoo! Search Submit. The clicks are cheap, but you don’t have a say in what search terms they use to display these listings you’re being charged for. We’ve found that our clients are usually paying for clicks on their own name–positioning that they should have for free. There’s an argument for it providing a lower-quality user experience as well, since the results aren’t going to be as truly relevant as Google’s.

Why pay at all if the practice is a little bit sketchy? Because otherwise, it’s crazy hard to get listed in Yahoo! at all. Since they index your site and drive traffic there by giving preferred positioning, it’s not such a bad deal, even if it is a bit devious. To just have the second-largest market share of search become one with the largest would have us SEO nerds blissed out like you wouldn’t believe. Fingers crossed!

It was recently The Holidays, which means business gifting along with the usual slate of presents for friends and family. When I was little, it was always an exciting time because dad would come home with gift baskets from vendors and clients. They contained strange and wondrous things, like cheese that didn’t seem to require refrigeration! And candy!

As an intern, coming up with, purchasing, assembling, packaging, and mailing gifts for clients became my responsibility. The first year, we had a handful of clients and I was on a month-long break from college. Since I’m a bit of a rock star in the kitchen, we did tins of handmade gourmet cookies, fudge, and my great-grandmother’s pecans. Last year, we did hat boxes filled with local goodies from bakeries, candy makers, tea shops, coffee roasters, and the great spicy Nuts on a Hot Tin Roof from the Houston Junior League’s cookbook.

You can’t really do that level of handiwork and personalization as your client base gets bigger and bigger. I understand ordering from one of the many corporate gift catalogs that start arriving mid-August. Over December, we had some things arrive in the mail to thank us for providing services, for using this service or that. Two stand out especially to me because they are gifts to us, their clients, from competing services–Google’s AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing.

One caveat: most of our clients are tech or b2b, whose demographics overwhelmingly prefer Google. This means we spend a lot less on pay per click advertising services with Y!SM than we would were we b2c-focused. What we spend isn’t insignificant, though. Which is why, when these arrived on the same day, one looked a lot better than the other.

From Yahoo!, we got a card that has seeds in the paper, so you can plant it and grow a mystery plant. It came mis-addressed–wrong first name, wrong business name, right address. Makes me wonder if Joe over at Rhino Engines and Transmissions has a fancy box of Yahoo! swag. A couple of weeks later, one of those roll-up USB keyboards arrived, in Yahoo! purple, natch. While it smells so strongly of chemicals you’d be afraid to touch it, you can use it in the bathtub or a sandstorm. This is a poor way to say thank you to a company who spends the cost of a house (albeit one in a marginal neighborhood) with you every year. Especially the messing up the address part.

The same week the seed card arrived, a precision-engineered box the size of a trade paperback arrived. Nestled inside the center hollow was this, with a nice little note and a gift card…

From Google, we have a very nifty 2GB flash drive that’s the size of a credit card with carrying case and a charitable donation gift card for $100 to DonorsChoose. DonorsChoose.org is a great thing. Teachers from poor districts register for what they really need for their classrooms, and you can give toward it. We helped outfit a 1st grade class with magnetic marker boards in a school in Queens that has a 95% poverty rate. The last thing we need is more exotic mystery cheeses that don’t need refrigeration. This was a great idea, providing something fun and useful for me and for people who really need it.

It’s obvious that only a corporate behemoth like the mighty Google could do something like this, and I’m not suggesting that this should be the norm for most companies. The important difference here isn’t how much one cost over the other. It’s about the thought that goes into it. Yahoo! would have been better off not sending anything than sending something that looks like it got bought from the picked-over shelves of the 24-hour CVS on Christmas Eve. It’s simple–you put your name on something and it becomes an emissary of your company. You know how in Scrooged, Bill Murray sends out towels embroidered with his network’s logo as Christmas gifts? Don’t be that guy.

Everyone’s been all atwitter about Google’s smack-down on blogs that function as link farms. They adjusted page rank scores, taking some from the bigger blogging networks that cross-link down to a PR 4/10 from a PR 7/10. This sucks for bloggers who weren’t intentionally seeking out sketchy linkage and are getting punished because the company automatically formats their blogs to include a bunch of cross-links. Scraped blogs that are definitely in the gray hat area? This is exactly what they deserve. Profiting (rankings-wise) off of other writers’ work is not contributing anything, it’s parasitic.

In the overall scheme of Google and the internet, anything that removes the bad and discourages people from using it as a quick fix is a good thing. You can’t get the results without the work. Affected blogs are getting the attention right now, but with this being the third very recent update to PR, it portends changes that reach much further than blogs. If page rank is about backward links, and it’s harder to get them, will Google be adjusting their importance in the algorithm concerning cost-per-click in their pay-per-click advertising services? It’s beneficial overall to push sites to prove their relevancy to the topic and give a good user experience, but it’s unfortunate that a lot of little guys will get burned for their ignorance.

In checking around about this, I’ve seen plenty of comments complaining about Google’s dominance. Google’s not the problem here. If they weren’t providing better results, they wouldn’t be so strongly in the lead–especially in academic, business, and technology sectors where they’re overwhelmingly preferred. The problem is that other engines propagate poor quality content by not punishing it and really working to eradicate it. As long as the dross is mixed in, and often in preferred positions, the savvy users won’t be changing loyalties.