Grrr! (Screencap: Scroogled)

Bing still trails far behind Google in search engine rankings, and Microsoft is just not having any of it. After launching Bing It On, a test that attempted to show that Bing occasionally surfaces better search results than Google, Microsoft has introduced its newest attack on the GOOG: an anti-Google Shopping site called Scroogled. Get it? Like Screw + Google?

The first thing you will notice when you navigate to Scroogled is an angry-looking mom character with a flippy bob making a face like she has to poop. "Grr," she seems to be saying, "Why is Google keeping me from pooping?" Scroll down a little further, and you will see a man who would not be out of place at a magician's convention gesturing to the solution to the mom person's poop problems: Bing!

The real reason for this smear campaign (heh) is actually rather convincing: Google recently changed its Google Shopping rules so that it now only surfaces products by merchants who have paid for placement on Google Shopping. Bing, Microsoft argues, shows you all results and not just those preferenced because they paid ad dollars. "We say that when you limit choices and rank them by payment, consumers get Scroogled," reads the site. "For an honest search result, try Bing."

Though as one Twitter user points out, Bing also gives preferential treatment on its shopping search to paid advertisers, as evidenced by the company's announcement following its partnership with Shopping.com. Awkward.

Microsoft has also asked those who have been "duped by bad search results" to share their stories on its Facebook page. And oh, have they. "Scroogled? I tried a search for microsoft surface on the Bing shoppings site and one in Google shopping," wrote one user. "The result? All of Bing's results are worthless, none of them is the actual Surface tablet. Google has relevant results and that is what matters."

Added another, "Desperation is getting higher then?"

Just look at that consistent brand identity.

In the latest (and possibly last) edition of Spin (which isn't online yet), there's a brief "Words of Wisdom" profile with rapper and Nicki Minaj collaborator 2 Chainz, where he makes a confession about his early attempts at self-promotion. His strategy? To work with other, more famous rappers, and thereby become "part of their Google." He elaborates:

"I would also try to be a part of their Google. Like when you Google Gucci Mane, Rocko, Gorilla Zoe, anyone in Atlanta--basically everybody except Outkast. I kept that same concept outside of Georgia. Every artist that wanted to work with me, I would do a verse with 'em."

By the laws of the Internet, you, sir, are now qualified to add "brand evangelist" to your Twitter bio.

(tumblrbot.tumblr.com)

Is Tumblr a pageview party, or a can o' spam? We almost missed this weekend discussion sparked by a post by Croatian blogger Sven Duplić about the percentage of Tumblr users that are spam-o-bots. And we're not talking about the lovable TumblrBot--we're talking about that cute girl who has never posted to her blog but seems to love everything you write. "On my blog, the precentage of bot-visitors are, by my judgement, is as high as 2/3," Mr. Duplić wrote.

The experience of Tumblr power users appears to be all over the map:

• "the number of spammers I see is less than 0.01% in a 90,000-follower account -- spammers are just more noticeable in an empty dashboard with no reblogs and no community exchange" (vruz)
• "One friend of mine runs a Tumblr on design, gets over 15,000 pageviews a month. He says that he gets 3 to 10 followers/likes who are spam a day. He blocks all of them to avoid linking his site to websites with plenty of ads or porn. It seems something is going on, it needs to be sorted out immediately." (antr)
• "My stats
  - Member since 25/6/2009
  - 7,500 posts
  - follow ~ 400 people
  - ~ 400 followers
  - post mostly photography / design / fashion
  - bots seen - < 5"
  (kodisha)
• "A lot of people that fit the profiles described are lurkers. Content consumers, but not creators. That's a pretty common thing on most social networks." (codezero)
• "Twitter is a botfest too - post anything with the phrase SEO in it and you get a bunch of followers with no icon, no tweets and no value. This is where Facebook has a big edge, the focus on real identity and the crack down on API use has kept Facebook much cleaner than the others" (jonnyf)
• "We have 300 followers right now, and I'm going to about 15% of our Likes are SPAM. A problem, but not completely overrunning the system. They seem to also be using Tumblr tag pages to find articles to like. Articles tagged with common product keywords like handbags, shoes, or a brand name get much more SPAM Like activity than other posts." (nickmolnar2)

For a startup that raised money on its pageviews and insane user growth, the percentage of content that is actually real is sort of important. But when a site gets to be as big as Tumblr (at 32.5 million blogs on last count) it automatically becomes a magnet for internet spam. Here is a good rundown of why Tumblr is so attractive to black hat SEOs--even blank profile pages have backlinking value.

This is a post by Matt Langer that originally appeared on his blog.

1. People tweet about dead celebrity

2. People tweet about what dead celebrity meant to them

3. People tweet insensitive jokes about dead celebrity

4. People tweet about how it’s too soon to be tweeting insensitive jokes about dead celebrity

5. People tweet about how other people tweeting about dead celebrity aren’t tweeting the right way about dead celebrity

6. People tweet about how people tweeting about dead celebrity should instead be tweeting about recent tragedy

7. People tweet about how people who tweet about how people tweeting about dead celebrity should instead be tweeting about recent tragedy are assholes

Bryne Hobart of Digital Due Diligence

Bryne Hobart learned the vagaries of Google rankings while working at Blue Fountain Media, one of the biggest SEO shops in New York. The 24-year-old college dropout had hoped for a career finance, but the market implosion of 2008 nixed that idea. Instead, he scored an internship writing copy at Blue Fountain, eventually working his way up to managing director of marketing.

As the tech sector began heating up, Mr. Hobart spotted an opportunity to distinguish himself on Wall Street. "I saw all these companies, like Demand Media, getting ready to have these big billion dollar IPOs and I thought, 'Their whole business is based on the kind of campaigns I run every day for clients.' Maybe there is something I can add to that discussion."

He and a colleague, Doug Pierce, had already been attracting a lot of attention with their research on how companies were gaming the system. Work they did at Blue Fountain became the basis of a February page-one story in The New York Times by "Haggler" columnist David Segal, exposing the dark arts being employed by JC Penney. A follow-up wilted the Mother's Day sales efforts of 1-800-FLOWERS. In both cases, coverage prompted Google and its all-powerful antispam enforcer, Matt Cutts, to tweak the engine's algorithms, banishing the sites, at least temporarily, to search-engine Siberia.

In March, Mr. Hobart and Mr. Pierce formed their own company on the side, Digital Due Diligence. His first post, on Demand Media, drew tens of thousands of readers and was passed around internally at the content farm. Mr. Hobart began monitoring other companies that were relying on some of the shadier SEO strategies, and posting these findings online. The idea behind the business was to help hedge funds and venture capital firms assess the risk of investing in companies that relied heavily on search traffic.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Hobart's double game--practicing SEO by day, exposing it by night--soon proved unsustainable.

In April, when DDD published a piece noting that the fashion site Milanoo was attracting a number of sketchy inbound links from sites about football and cars, their work was picked up by the massive industry blog TechCrunch. The revelation embarrassed the venerable Silicon Valley venture firm Sequoia, a Milanoo investor, and earned the fashion site its own spanking from Google. It also infuriated a lot of the partners' erstwhile colleagues, who saw them as turncoats who'd violated the ironclad omérta of the industry.

"Their main angle is whoring for media attention," Aaron Wall, a long-time expert at SEO Book, complained to The Observer. "People who destroy this trade for their own self-promotion deserve to be called out."

As Cyrus Shepard of SEOMoz put it, "This is a sticky issue because no one is quite sure about Digital Due Diligence at this time, given their less than clean past and conflicted motives. SEOs are asking 'Who is checking in their closets?'  and 'Who is policing the police?'"

Equally distressed by the post were their employers, whose clients include P&G, Oppenheimer Funds and the U.S. Mint. "They are two of the most valuable individuals in our marketing department, but this was a case of bad judgment," Blue Fountain CMO Alhan Keser wrote on the blog SEOBook. "I came back from a trip on Tuesday and confronted Byrne and Doug about the issue and asked them to stop outing companies."

Instead, Mr. Hobart quit. There was more opportunity, he thought, in evaluating the risks investors incur due to SEO than in performing it himself. "I looked at the attention I was getting for my posts on Due Diligence and just decided that it was time to strike out on my own," he said, noting that he is now scouting office space.

Despite the occasional scandal, search-engine optimization is now a $19 billion business. One of New York's more prolific SEO gurus, who agreed to speak to The Observer anonymously, sees the industry in zoological terms. "It's kind of like we're all gazelles running past a big crocodile" he said. "You just keeping hoping you don't catch the monster's eye."

Rather than simply paying for links, which often means relying on poor quality sites that are easy to identify as cheats, this "black hat," let's call him Merlin, uses his legitimate business as a cover. He created a simple, easy-to-use template for small-business owners looking to build their own inexpensive sites, then sold the templates well below market rate, quickly building a network of thousands of perfectly legitimate websites run by independent users.

Since he controlled the template, he was able to attach a bit of fine print to the footer of each page in the network. "Let's say I had a client who wanted to rank very highly for a keyword, maybe 'squash racket' or 'snow boots.' I had hidden links inside the text at the bottom of all these sites, and I could just turn the switch. Suddenly, 6,000 sites agree my client is the most relevant source on snow boots."

The insistence among SEO experts on defining certain tactics as legitimate and others as underhanded strikes Merlin as absurd. "Ethics, where search is concerned, is a luxury few companies can afford," he said. "Let's face it, the distinction between 'white hat' and 'black hat' changes all of the time. Those of us who ended up in this business are surprised to discover we're making good money. We're wearing a tie."

Shops that strive to uphold a higher ideal find that many clients arrive on their doorsteps chastened after past transgressions. "We have a lot of people come in who have been burned," said Rhea Drysdale, CEO of Outspoken Media. "We had a client come in from the world of online poker. They had swapped links with other sites," a practice she considers a no-no. "The attitude was, you had to do it in order to survive. It sounded kind of like a joining a gang; you needed to be initiated."

Mr. Hobart isn't yet 25, but he's already nostalgic for SEO's heyday. "I started off in this game as an intern, writing little articles to improve the look and feel of sites," he said wistfully. "But the time when an intern could get your site to rank are gone. eHow and Demand Media manufacture thousands of articles a day--there is no way to match that scale."

The future of SEO will demand different skills more suited to social media. "That's the scary thing, thinking about how things like Facebook and Twitter will change the game," Hobart said. "It's one thing with Google, trying to outwit the machine. It's different when you're trying to optimize on real people."