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The result is a Google search results page with no listings and the message at the top states:

“Google won’t search for Chuck Norris because it knows you don’t find Chuck Norris, he finds you.”

But wait! This result page is actually a hoax, only pretending to be from Google! It’s actually produced by Arran Scholsberg. Arran is a student at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and is a web designer and photographer.

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Bend Corporate Policy When Appropriate: Per the post about Zappos, they typically have a 15-day return policy for their products, even though they pay for shipping both ways. Due to the death of the customer’s mother, they had no problem making an exception given the tragedy the customer was dealing with.

Be Accessible: How many times have you tried to contact a company to lodge a customer complaint? How many hours of your life have you wasted in so-called “phone purgatory”? Unlike the “Spirit Airlines Story, Zappos was easily accessible and had a great response time. By giving your customers a way to easily provide positive (and negative) feedback about customer service issues, it prevents your customers from jumping to conclusions and blogging about it. Remember, that timing is everything.

Be Human: By putting yourself in your customer’s shoes, you will no doubt achieve customer service excellence. When Zappos found out that their customer’s mother had passed away, they arranged for their product pick-up and sent a huge bouquet of flowers. How’s that for reaching out and being nice to someone? Not only did they do something nice, their humanity turned into link bait — because their customer happened to be a blogger with an audience.

Practice Company Values: One of the best ways to preserve your reputation is to take a hard look on how you are selling your customer service. If you are billing “premier customer service,” then do whatever you can to back it up. That way, not only do your customers know what to expect, but they will be eager to refer your company to other individuals. Comments on blog posts like the “I Heart Zappos” showed that her referral drove new customers and traffic to their online store, just because Zappos practices what they preach.

Don’t Invalidate or Ignore Negative Responses: One negative response, if handled improperly, can be more powerful than you think. Type in “Spirit Airlines” and the #2 position in Google is a blog post that declares “Do not Fly Spirit Airlines.” Another big name company, Dell, had a policy not to respond to bloggers that was eventually reversed, but not before the blogosphere picked up on “Dell Hell.” Type that search into Google and find millions of blog posts, articles, and negative reviews all dedicated to talking poorly about Dell. If handled appropriately, you can turn a complaint into a positive experience, to change customer perspectives and get them blogging about you–in a good way.

Be Proactive, Not Reactive: Instead of reacting to when things go wrong, put yourself out there via a personalized email or note to your customers and let them know what happened if you made a mistake. If a customer is that unhappy with your products or services, offer multiple choices to let them choose what works best for them. Keep in mind that, by owning up to your mistakes and read about it for a week in the news, you will prevent getting attention from a group of angry, irate customers (potential bloggers) who then create something like “Dell hell” which will be around for a long, long time.

By keeping these thoughts in mind, and following Zappos example, not only will you preserve your brand’s reputation, but you will also increase brand loyalty. When you think about it, being nice to your customers is a lot like karma. The nicer you are, the more traffic you’ll get and, ultimately, the more links you’ll build.

I’ve previously opined that classic SEO may become extinct in favor of Usability, and announcements like this fluid handling of underscores would tend to support that premise. Google, Yahoo! and MS Live Search have been actively trying to reduce barriers to indexation and ranking abilities by changes like this plus improved handling of redirection, and myriad other changes which both obviate the need for technical optimizers and reduce the ability to artificially influence rankings through technical improvements.

I continue to think that the need for SEOs may decrease until they’re perhaps no longer necessary, so natural search marketing shops will likely evolve into site-building/design studios, copy writing teams, and usability research firms. The real question would be: how soon will it happen?

This past Saturday, I mosied over into central Dallas to check out the Kwik-E-Mart that was created to promote The Simpsons film, set to air nationwide later this week. The Kwik-E-Mart was created out of a 7-Eleven convenience store – surely the first ever instance of the subject of a satire being remade to more closely resemble the satire itself. The Dallas Kwik-E-Mart is one of the eleven created nationwide out of 7-Eleven stores, and it’s a simply fantastic piece of viral marketing, participatory marketing

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Read on for more details…

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Technorati only counts the total number of blogs which link to another blog for the Authority number, not the total number of links - which is good, since various blog features like categorization pages, preview snippets, and other pagination and navigation schemes common to blogs can cause a link from a single posting to reappear multiple times from a blog’s site.

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Read on for more details about the AMA Hot Topic Series day’s sessions.

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Download/Listen:

• Neil Patel interview (15 minute MP3, 3 megs) - getting to the front page of Digg and other social media sites
• Eric Ward interview (36 minute MP3, 8 megs) - tips and secrets on how to garner links
• Vanessa Fox interview (40 minute MP3, 9 megs) - Google’s webmaster tools, SEO impacts of AJAX, Flash, duplicate content, redirects, etc.

More podcasts to come from other speakers, so be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed so you don’t miss them. Also be sure to register for the conference at one of the three cities, it’ll be great!

A group of leading SEOs including Carsten Cumbrowski, Ahmed Bilal, and Rhea Drysdale will review one submission per week delivering a thorough review of usability and site navigation, link building, and copywriting from the perspective of placement in the four leading engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask).

It’s clear though that “free” is as free as having your site criticized in one of the SEO clinics experts like to host at conferences.  If chosen for review, the findings and recommendations will be posted for others to peruse.  I’d do as much myself and appreciate their efforts to help others with these case studies but as a website owner, someone responsible for SEO, or marketing manager for a major brand, I might not be so inclined to have my successes and failures outlined in detail for everyone to see.  That concern aside, I do hope they get some quality sites and develop a thorough library of reviews (perhaps I’ll sign up myself!).

To participate, simply contact the team here.