Jeremy Zawodny’s post about the importance of anchor text, got me to thinking. Mainly, about what other time-wasting games I could play with major search engines.
“The The” is the name of a band. Not just any band, but the creator of one of the top 100 albums of all time (at least) – Soul Mining (1983). But I figured that even if you typed the query “the the” in quotes, you’d be hard pressed to find this band’s site listed on the first page of search results. I tried it on Google, MSN Search, and Yahoo Search. Google failed, even when I added the word band after “the the.” MSN failed too.
But Yahoo nailed it! They listed The The’s site right in the top organic search position (notwithstanding the top news result about “keeping toe fungus on the run”).
The The’s poor showing in major search engine results pages is not the saddest or oddest thing, though. I leave that distinction to the fact that their haunting hit This is the Day is now the theme song in a water-resistant Dockers commercial. Muted outrage is spreading sedately through the blogosphere.
LInk: How much does anchor text matter?
Andrew Goodman is Principal of Page Zero Media, a marketing consultancy which focuses on maximizing clients’ paid search marketing campaigns.
In 1999 Andrew co-founded Traffick.com, an acclaimed “guide to portals” which foresaw the rise of trends such as paid search and semantic analysis.
