Bing

Microsoft’s Bing recently announced a search deal with Twitter. They’ve created a new page meant to show hot topics on Twitter. Here’s what that page looked like at 10:22pm, October 21, right after the Bing-Twitter deal went public:

Microsoft’s Windows 7? Really? “Thong Song” makes sense — it was being performed on Glee at the time. Modern Family was on, and the next Angels vs. Yankees game was around the corner. But that many people were chattering about Windows 7? If they’re buzzing about a Microsoft venture, wouldn’t it more likely be Bing itself, given the day’s news?

Here’s Twitter’s official Trending Topics block at the same moment, 10:22pm:

There’s Glee, “Thong Song,” baseball, dumb Kanye jokes… nothing about Windows or Microsoft.

And, for a third-party perspective, here’s Twitscoop’s hot trends cloud, also from 10:22pm, same night:

Thong is on fire right now! The Phillies are playing as we speak! REPORTING LIVE FROM THE INTERNET: Isn’t anybody as excited about Microsoft Windows 7 as they are about Cougar Town??

The Moral Moment

Clearly, Windows 7 is not actually hot on Twitter at the moment. It’s not presented on the Bing page as an ad, but what else to call it? If Microsoft wants to advertise Windows 7 on their Twitter page, that’s fine. But this kind of thing just makes them look old and out of touch. What happens when the unsatisfied Windows 7 users start piping up? Think their tweets will appear on Bing.com?

The Bing commercials are right: it’s not just a search engine. It’s a Microsoft ad.

Unlike WMDs, of course.

Last week, Fox News claimed SEO means “working full-time to create thousands of other Web sites that link to the spam site.” Not only does this have nothing to do with SEO, it would actually be a totally worthless strategy.

According to Wikipedia, SEO is an Arabic
word meaning “He who can move Egypt”

Since Google and Bing rank pages that have been around for a while and earned reputable links, each of these “thousands of” sites would have no link power to pass on to the “spam site.” Sure, some disreputable types try crap like this, and a few might even make money in the short run, but engines are more likely to ban a site with thousands of spammy links than to rank it highly.

As SearchEngineLand pointed out here, Fox News practices SEO on their sites. On the offending page in question, as a matter of fact. Meta description, sitemaps, and a robots.txt file to boot. Textbook SEO.

And SEOBook notes this “spamlaws.com” site that Fox News is so worked up about is serving “scammy reverse billing fraud fakevertising ads” that can also be found at… (you have three guesses, and the first two don’t count): FoxNews.com! Ta da!

Finally, here’s an interview with the head of Fox’s sixteen-person SEO team.

But whatever. Big media doesn’t understand the internet. That’s hardly news.