MSN, Yahoo Seek SEO People To Help Them Rank Better

There’s still the occasional person who I encounter who thinks that SEO
overall is somehow wrong to do or something the search engines frown upon.

Yahoo!, MSN & Ebay recruiting – SEO hits the big time is an example of why
this isn’t so. It covers how Yahoo, MSN and eBay in the UK are all recruiting
internal SEO people to help promote their own sites.

Such hirings aren’t new. We’ve long had search companies themselves trying to
rank well in other search engines, to the point of hiring people internally or
externally to make it happen. But it’s a nice reminder for everyone to keep in
mind.

Personally, I got a chuckle out of the breakdown Threadwatch did of the MSN
UK recruitment ad. Wanted:
Spammer-in-chief for MSN over there highlights some of these key success
metrics for

MSN UK’s SEO person:

• Achieve x% of traffic from Search engines within our top channels and
  homepage
• Achieve x% of pages cached/listed within Google and Yahoo
• Achieve first page ranking in Google/Yahoo for major channel entry points
  and other important MSN content areas
• Beat Yahoo! on listing results in Google on major events
• Demonstrate clear traffic improvement as a result of implementation of SEO
  techniques
• Ensure all new pages are SEO compliant

As for Yahoo, I found these points interesting:

• All title / meta data tagging of UK products
• URL specifications of UK products
• URL redirect mappings
• Producing SEO recommendations and documentation for UK products
• Fostering development of effective SEO tools / reporting process
• Maintaining existing Yahoo! UK product?s search engine rankings
• Identifying and flagging potential spam violations on UK products
• Identifying and flagging inappropriate Y! content that is accessible via
  search
• Weekly / monthly SEO reporting & statistics for UK products
• Keyword / log analysis reports for UK products
• Keeping web development, engineering and production up-to-date with
  developments in the SEO field

Note the part I bolded. Nice to see that Yahoo UK wants to ensure no one
suddenly accuses it of spamming itself or another search engine. Nah, such
things never happen. Wait a minute:
Google Admits To
Cloaking; Bans Itself. That was from last year, but to be fair, it was
pretty much an accidental thing.