Purple Widget – An SEO Experiment

Yes, PurpleWidget.com is still here! I know, it’s a been a while. I’ve been busy with my real job. That, and lazy.

Interestingly, or not so since it makes the entire original point of this blog – it’s easy to rank #1 for worthless keywords, we still rank #1 for purple widget. Despite no new content in almost 10 months. Either makes my case or speaks poorly of all Google’s freshness related updates. Probably a bit of both.

But I’m not back simply to remind everyone that we still rank – that’s getting old. I am aware.

I’m here to share the SEO slide that wasn’t. For my real job I was working on a PPT on the evolution of search. More specifically the Evolution Personalization Socialization of Search and part of this deck was to talk about the history of search, how search engines started, how they’ve changed, etc… Part of that history was the many pre-Google years when search engines were simply bad. The results they returned provided little to no value. In other words search results in the early days (1993-1996) were crappy.
Yes, I said it – crappy.
I think those in the search marketing industry – at least the few as old as I am will recall and agree that before Google search results really sucked. Google sucked much, much less – that’s why they are worth billions today. So I thought I would illustrate this with a strong visual. It was determined by those higher up on the food chain than I that my visual might not be appreciate by everyone in the potential audience, including clients in the future.

So, I made another slide that showed a quick visualization of bad search results from the early 90’s:

The acceptable version of showing what bad search results looked like before Google became Google.

Not all that clever, but certainly not offense to anyone.

So just be careful about being too clever when created an SEO slide deck that includes showing what bad results look like. Because just offending 1 person might be too many.

What’s that?
You want to see the original image in the slide that was cut?
You want to see what I thought was very clever but others worried would offend some?
Are you sure?
Okay