Search Engine Marketing Thoughts - Blogation

Many a blogger was a buzz today about Google's change to their homepage logo. Once upon a time, this was a quirky and creative concept that showed Google's willingness to stray from conventional best practices. These days, however, Google logo changes are either predictable (e.g. on the 4th of July), or driven by a desire to promote a new Google product, as is the case for today's change, a promotion for iGoogle customizable skins).

Bloggers that have actually spent energy today announcing this logo change are lame for two reasons: first, because of the aforementioned fact that this is nothing more than an attempt by Google to get free publicity for a product; and second, because anyone who happens upon the Google homepage (which the majority of Americans probably do once a day) would no doubt see this change themselves and therefore do not need to be reminded of this by bloggers who are supposed to be writing about interesting developments in the world of search engine marketing.

For the record, bloggers like myself - who are criticizing others for their inane journalism are justified in spending energy on this topic - consider this post to be analogous to The Daily Show reporting on other reporters reporting a meaningless story (yes, I just compared myself to The Daily Show and I recognize that I am inviting much ridicule by doing so . . .).

Here are some of the juicy blog posts glowing about today's Google logo change:

SEO Roundtable's account of the logo change provides no information that could not be gleaned by actually clicking on the Google logo.

I give some credit to Search Engine Watch for using the iGoogle logo as a launching pad to discuss Jeff Koon's marriage to an Italian porn star. Unfortunately, the articles incorrectly posits: "Why in the world would a world-famous artist like Jeff Koons hire himself out for graphic design work? It seems the multimillionaire artist and ex-husband of an ex-porn star may need the moolah." As other stories note (those that copied the Google press release), none of the artists were paid - charitable donations were made on their behalf.

The San Francisco Chronicle, on the other hand, wrote up the story by basically quoting a Google press release.

CNET also quotes liberally from Google PR, and adds a weak justification for covering the story: "It may not help Mountain View on its quest to organize all the world's information, but it can make some of that information look a little prettier."