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.