At the International Search Marketing Conference last week, held at The British Library, I was asked to represent Receptional and join two other leading European marketing firms in that twilight period just after lunch, to show the audience some of the worst observations of bad internet marketing tactics that Receptional had seen over it's long history.

There is a tendency on the internet for webmasters, individuals and companies to grasp one internet marketing concept and try to run with it for as far as they can, thinking "that is all there is to it". Internet marketing isn't rocket science, but then rocket science is pretty straightforward in theory, but you wouldn't want amateurs designing your spacecraft would you! Here are a few of the examples that we came up with.

Boo.com marked the first internet bubble crash, a moment that I remember well because I launched my first major press release on the back of our observations. Just before the Boo.com website closed down, we had the opportunity to look at the source code on the site. We found that the developers (presumably whilst building the site) had used what's called a "robots exclusion tag" to tell all the search engines NOT to put the site into the search engines. Nobody had removed the tag until the day they crashed. Not that it would have helped anyway.