One of the minor annoyances with the introduction with Bing is that all the tools currently used has to be updated (assuming of course you care about MSN/Live/Bing for your work). The sad reality of all this is that Google Analytics has yet to update its system to include Bing as a standard search engine–even Omniture has done this!

Maybe it’s Google just thinking “eh, with all the mistakes on it currently, they’ll just rename it again anyway?”

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Want to see effectiveness of “Google Bombs” still on-going on other engines? Take a look at Microsoft’s new Bing and type in some of the usual (now hidden Googlebombs) ones like “French Military Victories” or “Miserable Failure”

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I wanted to ntoe in a separate post to keep in mind that everyone is human and that mistakes are made at some time and place. Even the best at Microsoft can make a simple mistake and accidently indirectly support blackhat SEO tactics in search that are against their own search engine.

At the same time, you will find mistakes happening on the other side with agencies not properly putting in their information properly to run a campaign. Case in point, just a minute or two after I wrote about Microsoft, I noticed the following AdSense image on my website:

The green box highlighted shows that the agency for ABC (or internal team) accidently let this one go out into the public without noticing. Even more hilarious is that Google’s AdSense team did not automatically catch this either! Clicking on the link regardless goes to an error page which apologies to the team who “made” this, but I had to click to see if it went anywhere.

So the moral of the story? Everyone is human and mistakes happen, so be kind, rewind, and apologize when you mess up.

Except for us SEOs, we never make a mistake. *winks*

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Microsoft’s Senior Product Manager of Office Live Small Business wrote a blog post about some of types of link building you can engage in for the purpose of generating additional back links to your site. He starts his post with:

If you want lots of visitors to your Web site, it helps to have lots of links to your Web site. Link exchanges — sometimes called reciprocal linking or link swaps — are a popular way to generate more links.

Digging the hole deeper by listing a few sites such as LinksMaster.com (an automated link-exchange program) and LinkStrategy.com (paid links site) without actually checking with the Search team on what Microsoft’s guidelines are:

..Techniques that might prevent your website from appearing in Live Search results
The following techniques aren’t appropriate uses of the Live Search index. Use of these techniques might affect how your website is ranked within Live Search, and might cause your website to be removed from the index….. - Using techniques, such as link farms, to artificially increase the number of links to your webpage.

Now, I titled this post that he was indirectly (and obviously unintentionally) supporting blackhat SEO tactics since he did not specifically endorse the tactics but only talked about the ways you could garner more links. The problem is that his first post did not specifically note the downsides of the tactics, nor read Microsoft’s own guidelines.

His second post is trying to walk back from those statements by noting that it is the abuse of the techniques that are not allowed, noting that it could cause problems with search engines. The hilarity of all this is that Microsoft itself says that even using the techniques he talked about are not appropriate. That and plainly any kind of automated software to acquire back links is quite blackhat SEO tactic and is not within an inch of whitehat SEO.

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IGnatius T Foobar writes on Slashdot:

“Microsoft has developed a small plug-in device that investigators can use to quickly extract forensic data from computers that “may have been used in crimes.” It basically bypasses all of the Windows security (decrypting passwords, etc.) in order to eliminate all that pesky privacy when the police have physical access to your computer. Just one more reason not to run Windows on your computer.”

Think of how easy then it would be for Microsoft to provide backdoor access into its programs for the American government, definitely in the case if the US gets its hands on a Chinese laptop, but even more scary for the Chinese government, over the Internet with various programs that Microsoft provides to the American government.

Think of how easy it is already for other software makers to put in hidden software through rootkits as Sony previously did. This would make it quite easy for keystroke logging, password retrieval, and other tracking systems in order to get information on other governments.

Then again, how many people are gullible in just clicking on a friend’s IM link that opens up an .exe file?

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Google issued want could be seen as a general warning to Microsoft over the hostile bid for all of Yahoo:

Google said Sunday that Microsoft’s proposed $44.6 billion takeover of Yahoo could pose a number of potential threats to competition that need to be examined by policymakers around the world.

Google said in a blog post on its Web site that given Microsoft’s anti-competitive conduct in the past and its continued dominance in the technology industry, the proposed transaction could pose threats to “innovation and openness” on the Internet. But Google’s broadly worded concerns lacked detailed claims about the anticompetitive effects of the deal, and the company did not ask federal regulators to take any specific actions at this time.

From a branding perspective, I can see why Google would respond to the bid publicly, but I personally see Google not having to worry with a takeover of Yahoo for the following reasons:

1. MSN and Live suck majorly as search engines.
2. Yahoo sucks as a search engine company.
3. MSN and Yahoo have such different cultures that will undoubtfully clash against each other.
4. Any merger/takeover will take precious time away from fighting Google in the next year or two that will only further secure Google’s position.
5. Risk of the worst of both worlds from the takeover–MSN’s poor search engine + Yahoo’s poor marketing abilities = Google monopoly.
6. Additional Yahoo layoffs leading to top search people fleeing to Google rather than to Microsoft (lesser of two evils perhaps?)

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