Some sites like to play music when you land on them. I’m not sure why. I suppose they want to envelop the visitor into an entire “experience” or set a mood or portray their musical point of view. (Phrase unapologetically stolen from the Food Network’s food reality show where the judges are always asking the contestants to create dishes that express their “culinary point of view”. Ha!)

In any case. When I get to your site, I am not looking for an experience. I am looking for some information to complete my task. That’s what most searchers are doing too. If you invest a lot of resources in ranking well for key phrases and then cause those searchers to flee your site while holding their heads repeating “make it stop!” over and over, well, all the ranking in the world isn’t going to help you gain customers.

I’m generally against any music at all on a site (I am listening to my own music, thank you very much, and now with yours playing, it sounds like the symphony of the dueling evil composers in hell. Just saying. Exceptions for singers and bands, although I would still prefer a large play button that enables me to start the music experience myself (what if I’m in Starbucks! Or on an airplane! Or jury duty!).

If you think I am a lone voice in a sea of music-as-an-essential-part-of-the-web-experience lovers, then please, for the sake of puppies and kittens and fluffy clouds, at least give me a pause button. Or a mute button.  Because if you don’t, the easiest way for me to get the music to stop is to leave your site.

Amazingly, there are sites whose methods of adding a musical soundtrack to the web experience make most musical sites seem AWESOME. Below are two. I present them as a cautionary tale.

Lebanese Ministry of Tourism

They picked a very short song. And play it over and over and over. And then they play it some more. And I can’t find a mute or pause button anywhere.

Mercedes Garage

They restart the music every time you navigate to a different page. Seriously.  And there’s no way to turn it off! I was looking for their contact information, but I had to close the site as quickly as possible and call a different garage. All because they added music to their site. Which means, by the way, they did additional work, which resulted in driving customers away.

I present this post as a public service announcement. I’m just trying to make the web a better place.

Today, I was browsing apartment rentals in Riga, Latvia. I was searching via the Flock toolbar, which defaults to Yahoo search. I found a pretty good result that had all kinds of apartments, with prices, descriptions, pictures, and maps, and lots of great information about the area. This wasn’t a fly-by-night operation, autogenerated made for AdSense site.

At first, the site got me thinking of geolocation issues. The domain has a .lv TLD, which makes sense, as it’s a Latvian-based company, except that they likely are targeting an audience not in Latvia, and does the TLD prevent them from ranking as well as they could for searchers in other countries.

But then I got distracted from all of that by something else. In the left nav, along with events, bars, and excursions, was another menu item: Link exchange. Really? In 2009 a link exchange program so blatant it gets main menu treatment? I scrolled to the footer. Copyright 2002. But the reviews are from 2009, so clearly the site is still being updated.

I clicked on the link exchange option. That brought me to a page with link-exchange in the URL. The page instructs people to copy their text link code into their web sites and once that’s done, email them with information about the reciprocal link. Sure enough, looks like lots of sites have done just that. “Link partners” include an RSS feed submission program, online mattress sales, Canadian car insurance, and diesel electric generators.

These are my questions: the owners of the Riga apartment and all of the sites listed on the link exchange page know enough about SEO to know that links matter, but they don’t know enough about SEO to know that link exchanges can hurt you (or at the very least not help you) in the search engines? Clearly, the apartment site isn’t trying to hide its link program and the reciprocating sites don’t mind being prominently listed on the “reciprocal link exchange page”. Are these site owners following bad advice and know just enough to be dangerous? It’s a conundrum.

Sure enough, the site ranks #1 in Yahoo for relevant queries, but for those same queries, it ranks on the third page of Google’s results (and on the second page of Bing). And it’s a good site, with great content. It’s exactly the site I was looking for. And it likely would be better off without all the resource investments of that link exchange programs. The company apparently spends time reviewing incoming emails and updating the web site with links — they are allocating limited resources to something that’s actively hurting them.

Seems kinda crazy.

I have tons of really long blog posts I want to write, have half-written, have nearly done, but clearly none of that is getting this blog updated. So, I’m going to introduce a new feature, in which I post short, random thoughts about search craziness. And maybe search awesomeness.

I’m calling it search shorts, because I’m creative like that.