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.

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!

Search Engine Optimization is crazy. Learning about SEO can be overwhelming. Even if you’re only looking for a good SEO consultant, you need to know the basics. Optimization involves making lots and lots of small changes. It’s like being the general of your own, personal army of Oompa Loompas.

First of all, there are no mighty Oompa Loompa warriors. You won’t be able to make a few changes to the site and be done with it. You need to make lots of small changes all the time. However, if your site’s in bad shape now, you’ll need a throng of Oompa Loompas to fix the problems and create a strong foundation for you to build on.

But you can’t let your Oompa Loompas run rampant. Think of the chaos. No, your Oompa Loompa Army needs to be organized into platoons:

• keyword phrase research;
• content development using the identified keyword phrases;
• developing abundant links on other, relevant sites to your site;
• good, clean code;
• good site architecture.

Keyword Phrase Research: This is your Oompa Loompa Army Intelligence Department. Their mission is to find the keyword phrases that people actually use when searching. In the pre-internet days, your marketing would bring the people to you. Nowadays, you have to meet the people where they are. Keyword Phrase Research tells you where to go, so to speak.

Content Development: This is your Oompa Loompa Infantry. Optimization doesn’t happen until you get the keyword phrases worked into the pages. By the way, you need more pages. Each page is like an additional Oompa Loompa for your Infantry.

External Links: This is your Oompa Loompa Artillery. Search engines want to display the best results possible for each search. The number of sites that link to your site qualifies you as having some value, especially when the sites linking to you involve the same subject matter as your site.

Clean Code: Ironically, this is the Mess Hall for your Oompa Loompa Army. Soldiers need to eat good, healthy food for peak performance. Likewise, optimized pages need good, clean code for maximum benefit.

Good Architecture: This represents your Oompa Loompa Engineers. Army engineers build bridges and roads. Your site needs a stable infrastructure. URLs should be free of extended query strings (everything after the question mark in the URL). Navigating through the site should not require the use of javascript or submitting forms. Important pages need to be “top level� pages (i.e., linked off the home page).

Oompa Loompa and SEO success is achieved by an overwhelming volume of small victories.

Why Oompa Loompas? Because they are small, plentiful, and they take the moral high ground on every occasion. It’s easy to find yourself in a gray area with SEO. The last thing any of us needs is to have a bunch of Oompa Loompas singing about some faux pas we’ve made. Oompa Loompas are here to keep you on the straight and narrow. SEO is here to get you more and better qualified leads.

A special note to our current and prospective clients: although we provide many search engine optimization services, including SEO copy writing, I am not one of our writers. You may see my work in parts of your search engine optimization audit, but rest assured that your audit and all of the copy we write and optimize will be 100% Oompa Loompa free. That is my personal guarantee to you.

Everything seems to have a small pool of people who do the bulk of the using. Whether it’s eating fast food or working out, there’s a loyal core. Who wasn’t grossed out in Supersize Me when they revealed that there are “heavy users” at McDonald’s that eat all three meals there several times a week? There are people who eat at Jack In A Box more times in a week than I have in 25 years. The advent of something that enables a certain lifestyle has changed how heavy users function in the world; it’s created a reliance.

Search is no different. The answer to anything is available at any time, any place. It’s changed the way some people operate their lives, how they use their brains, what they feel the need to remember and what can be transient. I have an engineer friend who always seems to have new gadgets, and he (of course) has a phone with PDA/browser/music/camera. He’s always online, Googling stuff mid-conversation as he thinks of questions about the topic at hand. I haven’t gotten a similar phone as a discipline to step away from the screen, not because it’s not something I’d use constantly.

I’ve talked about search with my friends (job hazard), and found that we don’t conform to the usual search behavior reported in studies and assumed when doing SEO work. Admittedly, we’re younger, more tech-savvy, more educated than the average American computer user. Nobody uses defaults, everyone exclusively uses Google for search. We don’t go down into the results if it’s not in the first page (30 results for me), but rather we refine the query. We don’t use information, we text Google for free to get the numbers and addresses.

When I write, I search words through the Answers.com add-on to the Google toolbar to get the thesaurus and make sure I’m picking the one with the right nuances. In conversation, when someone starts off with, “I wonder…”, half the time someone’s reaching for their notebook to find out the answer immediately. It’s a radically different way of life and operating. Battelle talks about this study from Complete in regard to who the big three have in mind when designing their tools–the 20% of people who do 70-75% of the searches, or the people who do a few searches a week? That’s the practical, business application, and an interesting question. I’m more interested in the trending toward the search volume of power searchers becoming the norm as the generations raised with technology come of age. What does it mean for information? What does it mean for search and the industry that has grown up around it?

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.