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"Look At Me" Search Results

12 Nov 2003 by Jason Fried

Some people are getting really creative in order to stand out in Google search results. Check out these results from Google. Look at the second or third result set down. See the big honking arrow bullet thing in front of the “NETFLIX Free Trial - Coupon - Netflicks Offer Code” result? Really stands out, doesn’t it? It’s simply a “►” in their TITLE tag. Smart, isn’t it? I don’t know which browsers will be able to display this (maybe all?), but here’s a screen shot in case it doesn’t work for you:

15 comments so far (Post a Comment)

12 Nov 2003 | Andy Baio said...

A question: why are these obnoxious advertisements ranked so high in Google anyway? Maybe Google should assign "arrow bullets in title tags" a couple negative points in their Pagerank calculation.

12 Nov 2003 | tlack said...

People have been doing that on Craigslist for a while. I'm surprised Google doesn't try harder to filter that kind of thing.

12 Nov 2003 | Matt Haughey said...

Never trust a URL with 2 or more dashes in it, I always say. It seems all my travel related searches end up at something like "name-of-city-hotel-deals.com".

12 Nov 2003 | Tobias said...

Similar: http://www.mario-fischer.de/mario_fischer.html
He has got Stars (★) in his title...
~T

12 Nov 2003 | jupiter said...

Mario Fischer seems to be a funny guy - his homepage says that he's professor for "visitor-magnetizing". Achtung - could be dangerous...

12 Nov 2003 | Adrian said...

Well, nothing but a space visible in Safari 1.0, thanks for the screenshot :))

12 Nov 2003 | Jay Allen said...

Thanks for the mention trout, but the more interesting URL (for the above spam page and utility for MT users) is this one: Comment Spam Clearinghouse.

12 Nov 2003 | said...

I think I'll stand out by being (in about two months) the only one without it.

12 Nov 2003 | ! said...

Jimmying Google results, standing out, and getting people to visit has become more important than creating a site worth visiting.

12 Nov 2003 | Dr_God (fka Tibloto) said...

There are a ton of these buggers. Here is a nice list of all the kooky characters you can use.

12 Nov 2003 | francois said...

I think this will be recognised as unfair practice by Google (and hopefully other search engines) before long, and either penalised or (less harmfully) simply stripped of the offending characters.

It does nothing to change my disdain of Netflix, who used to be frequent comment spammers on my blog (their advertising affiliates, anyway).

12 Nov 2003 | Dave Strus said...

The dude who posted the instructions for installing multiple versions of IE/Win (http://www.insert-title.com/web_design/?page=articles/dev/multi_IE) has four humongous stars in his title.

30 Dec 2003 | armandosalerno said...

like

30 Dec 2003 | armandosalerno said...

like

16 Jan 2004 | Jasper said...

If an application is designed well, the reward for users is that they will learn it faster, accomplish their daily tasks more easily, and have fewer questions for the help desk. As a developer of a well-designed application, your returns on that investment are more upgrade revenue, reduced tech support, better reviews, less documentation, and higher customer satisfaction. The rewards of building a good-looking Aqua application are worth taking the extra time.

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