For years, Starbucks didn’t seem to have a clue… the Starbucks.com home page showed up in Google with the title “Cookies required.” It wasn’t even “Delicious, fresh-baked hot-out-of-the-oven cookies required!” Finally now they’ve corrected this to a ho-hum “Starbucks.com.”
These guys don’t exactly looked “clued in.” For an offline equivalent, I’d imagine a yellow pages ad announcing: “No time for a proper ad this year. Check next year’s book and hopefully we’ll be on the ball by then.”
Not nearly as bad, but still needing attention, is Home Depot’s home page search listing with the title “Thank you for visiting.”
The worst offender is Hotmail: for years their home page shows up in Google as “Sign-in Access Error.” Gee that really instills confidence, particularly when I’m searching Google for “free email” and Hotmail’s access error listing is juxtaposed next to Yahoo’s much more compelling listing, titled “Yahoo! Mail – The best web-based email!”