On Monday morning we saw signals of Google’s knobs turned too high on nearby word associations. I suggested that you :

Go ahead and talk about keyword one and keyword two today and tomorrow. The anchor text doesn’t matter as much as the distance to the nearest neighbors today.

Today the SERPs are all full of mashup winners… like Portishead at the top of Christine Dolce search. Check the cache and you see

These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: dolce

The top spot for Chrstine Dolce is the portishead myspace page. Many, many MySpacers list Christine Dolce as a friend, and Portishead as a fave. As does Christine Dolce herself. Does that justify a top rank? Really, Google. Synonyms are so 2004.

Where was that bit about people linking to you having no effect on your rankings….

In a flip of the words, look at the hit count for mentions of suicide on MySpace:

Google shows 29.1 million pages for site:myspace.com
Google shows 1.86 million of those include the word “suicide”
If you remove “goth” you still get 1.75 million, so that’s not it.
Adding “depressed” didn’t do much to the count (62,000), nor really did “depression“

I was asked for an example of a non-MySpace person doing a good job using MySpace for marketing. I looked around. I saw plenty of bad MySpace pages. They sort of look like Web1.0 pages in a Web2.0 world…stiff, stodgy, unstyled. And then I found someone had a Suicide Girl as her MySpace friend. Wow. Cool. I wonder if they loaded each one of the Suicide Girls onto separate MySpace pages, cross-linked them all, plastering the pages with ads for the Suicide Girls membership site? That’s what I would have done. Let’s face it, these girls look exactly like prototypical MySpacers (+15 years).

Well, they did one anyway. Not a bad job at all. 9,218 “friends” including a handful of promotional ones like “Subscribe to Suicide Girls Videos” and “Become a Suicide Girls photographer“. I’m sure it’s doing a fab job or raising awareness of the SG perversion amongst the MySpace teens, and I have little doubt those SG ads convert. Of course the subject matter fits into MySpace fairly naturally, but we know SG is actually old so this qualifies as an effective use of MySpace.