We now know that Microsoft is spending $80 to $100 million on a branding and marketing campaign to promote Bing. This is great news as it seems that Microsoft has finally put some financial muscle behind their intention to be a major player for search. Bing should also be taken seriously because Microsoft has even deeper pockets to invest more money as part of their overall online strategy. Sorry Yahoo, but now that Microsoft seems to have the financial and strategic will to mount an attack against Google, this message is specifically for Bing: do something amazing!

Bing needs to do the small stuff well and create an excellent user experience, but it also needs to make some high profile investments like Google Earth, Google Street View and the Google Books Library Project to show that it means business. This means that Bing should invest early and invest a lot now that the sound of the buzz of Bing is still ringing in our ears. There was MSN, then there was Live, and if Microsoft cannot succeed with Bing, then this is strike three and you’re out.

Guess I shouldn’t get too far ahead of myself in what is sure to be a very gradual roll out that already has the anti-trust people in the Senate very, very interested…

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.

must buy: at the same time, we will increasingly make online advertising easier and more effective for marketers, opening up new ways for them to address consumers. our right media exchange, acquired last year, is more open and easy to use, simplifying transactions for buyers and sellers of online ad inventory. another 2007 acquisition, blue lithium, brings us best in class performance marketing. while we’ve historically tracked the success of our ad business by focusing on metrics related to our owned and operated sites, our goal is to increase the percentage of the total online advertising demand we touch—to 20% of our addressable market over the next several years, from an estimated 15% in 2007.

I had wondered about that, since Panama’s only been running for about a year. Even before they announced their rejection this morning, there have been rumors of Yahoo! renewing talks with AOL. I haven’t a clue what that would gain Yahoo! in the long term since AOL is a slowly-failing dinosaur who uses Google’s search results. Who still uses AOL?

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!

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.