April 7, 2006

Such hirings aren't new. We've long had search companies themselves trying to rank well in other search engines, to the point of hiring people internally or externally to make it happen. But it's a nice reminder for everyone to keep in mind.

Personally, I got a chuckle out of the breakdown Threadwatch did of the MSN UK recruitment ad. Wanted: Spammer-in-chief for MSN over there highlights some of these key success metrics for MSN UK's SEO person:

• Achieve x% of traffic from Search engines within our top channels and homepage
• Achieve x% of pages cached/listed within Google and Yahoo
• Achieve first page ranking in Google/Yahoo for major channel entry points and other important MSN content areas
• Beat Yahoo! on listing results in Google on major events
• Demonstrate clear traffic improvement as a result of implementation of SEO techniques
• Ensure all new pages are SEO compliant

As for Yahoo, I found these points interesting:

• All title / meta data tagging of UK products
• URL specifications of UK products
• URL redirect mappings
• Producing SEO recommendations and documentation for UK products
• Fostering development of effective SEO tools / reporting process
• Maintaining existing Yahoo! UK product’s search engine rankings
• Identifying and flagging potential spam violations on UK products
• Identifying and flagging inappropriate Y! content that is accessible via search
• Weekly / monthly SEO reporting & statistics for UK products
• Keyword / log analysis reports for UK products
• Keeping web development, engineering and production up-to-date with developments in the SEO field

Note the part I bolded. Nice to see that Yahoo UK wants to ensure no one suddenly accuses it of spamming itself or another search engine. Nah, such things never happen. Wait a minute: Google Admits To Cloaking; Bans Itself. That was from last year, but to be fair, it was pretty much an accidental thing.