In looking at where my traffic came from yesterday, I was really surprised to see a rather definitive spike in referrals from LSE.co.uk. No, it's not the London School of Economics (that would be cool), but London South East - a trading/speculation site (as far as I can make out) for the stock market. It amazes me the misinformation and idiocy that exists online, and I feel I can be a bit more cutting because the stupidity is well outside of the search engine marketing industry this time.
Flubugg, a member of the site since March of this year who only posts on the Yell boards (that's Yell as in Yell.com, not shouting), picked up my Mysterious Yellow Dot post from last Friday. According to Mr Bugg, that ominous yellow dot spells signals of doom and Google's purchase or domination of the information superstar:
Come on, buddy. Are you for real? In days gone by, Mr Bugg and his friends would be the wiry old witches in the village, divining rainfall and quantities of spring onions using a putrid goose egg and a lock of hair from a firstborn male. Checking the comments just a tad further down, Mr Bugg would have read that Dan suggested it was a bug from take a tour of the new interface - nothing to suggest that Yell and Google were entering into matrimonial bliss. It doesn't mean anything more than someone forgot to re-code a pixel or two.
To be fair, Yell is an AdWords reseller in the UK (as they have been in the US for yonks), but this has been going on for much longer than the yellow dot. In fact, since that little yellow dot has shown up outside of the UK and the US, the theory that it's Yell's presence in Google AdWords (which they do have, but you don't need a dinky little dot to tell you that, just a computer with internet access and knowledge of how a search engine/news site works) is pretty much bunk. But you probably guessed that already...
To clarify, there's no doom and gloom, Mr Bugg and associates. Just a coding error from a lowly engineer. Try not to take that bunny-shaped cloud as a sign of General Motors shares going up. Just sayin'...
