NP: Oasis, "Don't Look Back In Anger"

As someone who works in Search Engine Marketing, I have absolutely no problem with BP buying paid search terms such as "oil spill" to get their links on the search results page. This is exactly what every professional in the industry would tell you to do in order to help stem the tide of negative content that's indexing high in the natural search results.

And while the emotional response is to want BP to spend every last available resource on stopping and then cleaning up the Deepwater Horizon spill, that's just never going to happen, and probably wouldn't work its way all the way down to the paid search budget anyway. It may just be a reallocation of the current search spend.

If you really have a problem with this as a tactic, click on the BP link a lot, because that's when the search engine charges BP money, and you have to figure they're paying top dollar for that first position, seeing as their links might not be seen by Google and Yahoo's algorithms as "relevant." to those search terms.

Yeah, that was a paid search marketing joke. If you don't get it, that's okay.