The New York Post sees things differently. It wants the world to know that their city won the Super Bowl tonight. How did they do that? They covered their entire front page in New York Giants.

It’s not my place to judge any Web site on how they design their front page, but this just seems a little excessive. At least they have pride in their team. That’s the most important thing.

Score a point in the column for Oodle. They have announced a deal with the New York Post that will bring Oodle’s touch to the Post’s classifieds.

"New York Post users will now be able to search New York’s largest collection of online classified listings in tickets, pets, merchandise and services as well as post their own ads for free," Oodle said in its announcement. Oodle’s services are live on the Post’s site today.

The jobs section will remain with the Post’s current job classifieds provider, Adicio. Neither Oodle nor Yahoo’s HotJobs and its consortium of newspapers have managed to win over Murdoch’s Post for those lucrative listings.

Oodle recently revamped its site, and launched "Oodle 2.0" in November 2007. The site touted the addition of 500,000 new listings each day, and over 30 million listings aggregated from 80,000 sites.

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Richard Wilner, who chastises those spending too much on AdWords in another post on the same day, and Holly M. Sanders cite a forthcoming audit of search results by London-based Internet Search Management (ISM).

The essence of the expected report, according to the Post, is that paid search is tantamount to "one of the worst-spent marketing dollars on the Internet." Entities in the United Kingdom and the newspaper industry have been rather down on Google in general lately.

The article based on the not-yet-released report touts organic results over sponsored ones, because, well, they’re free. Everybody give a warm welcome to the Post for discovering the concept of SEO.

The audit is expected to say that paid search (SEM, to introduce the Post to another new acronym) doesn’t yield a good enough ROI to make it worth it. Instead of an AdWords campaign, marketers should consider following Amazon’s lead and buy websites that already have high natural rankings.

We’ve talked about this before, and we generally didn’t like the idea of it, from an ethical standpoint – sort of the if you can’t beat’em, buy’em strategy. But it is further evidence that the strategy is being adopted – we might expect Google’s next algorithm tweak to reflect this practice. Length of time a domain has existed or been registered seems to play a factor already.

This is most certainly an option for bigger players with bigger budgets, though. Some keywords are pretty much "locked" at this point, making the natural search results rather impervious. Buy a site that ranks well and you’ve got that result, however finite the number of businesses that can do that is.

However, it seems counterintuitive to offer this advice to the vast majority of web marketers out there, just as it does to suggest AdWords is unnecessary or a waste of money. You may be able to make a case for the lack of attention and clicking that ads in the side panel get. But the top sponsored are another story.

Though eBay pitched a hissy fit, as we say in the South, a bit ago and pulled its campaign, a move that, if permanent, would have cost Google hundreds of millions of dollars annually, the online auction giant realized the strained, symbiotic relationship it has with the top search engine. EBay ads are once again on Google.

Aside from budget and traffic, though, there is another concern. Not bidding on your brand name keyword, as suggested in the Post article, runs the risk of your competitor owning it. Mazda and Pontiac have been through this, and lessons were learned.

Of course we also know that branding, in general, is not always about immediate ROI. It’s about being recognized on the street, or the SERPs, at a glance. Any guesses as to why McDonald’s golden arches are the first symbol children can recognize? Excellent (the best, really) branding.

As for the Post’s "Search & Destroy" Google article, it’s nice to see them holding up the fine, yellow tradition first established during the Pulitzer/Hearst wars a century ago.

Via SEObook.

“GNYPost.com Suffering DNS Issue”

A funny thing happened on the way to NYPost.com to read about the recent Alex Rodriguez gossip talk. My browser sent me to another domain. I tried the request in a couple of different browsers, all with the same result.

After checking the old hosts file for any weirdness, I decided to give someone a call and see what was up. The phone number for the Post in the whois lookup went to voicemail, and the technical contact information proved to be incorrect.

Fortunately, someone at what appeared to be the Post’s service provider was able to give me numbers to the correct business, Quality Technology Services. Someone named Monica answered, and when I asked about the Post’s issue, she said they were aware of it.

Even though I identified myself when she answered, she asked if I was a contact. I said no, I was a reporter who had stumbled upon what appeared to be a DNS issue. When I tried to ask her another question, I was delighted that she immediately hung up on me.

Hey Rupert Murdoch, it’s 7:30 pm on the East Coast. Do you know where your domain is right now? Because your technical services company doesn’t seem to have it under control yet. I’ve helpfully attached a screenshot to this article, please see below.