Bonum Certa Men Certa

Novell Employees/Contractors Take More Marketing to Search Engines, YouTube

Image makeover by subverting Google

HOW LOW Novell has sunk. It's hiring people whose job is to manipulate search engines. Here is the new press release:

One of the world’s largest infrastructure software companies has appointed a Yorkshire-based company to manage its Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns.

Novell, based in Waltham, MA, USA known for its infrastructure software including SUSE€® Linux Enterprise, an operating system in use by businesses worldwide, has specific requirements for its search marketing campaign, including multilingual SEO and PPC management and localisation of online advertising that Search Laboratory will now provide.


There is some coverage of this in the British press.

Search Laboratory will now lead Novell’s search marketing campaign, including multilingual SEO (search engine optimisation) and PPC (pay-per-click) management, along with localisation of online advertising.


Will they also have capacity for elbowing aside or harassing critical blogs?

Unrelated to this, someone has just added this new Novell advert to YouTube (assuming it's not just new on YouTube).

Ogg Theora







Direct link



A Novell employee still uploads Novell adverts to YouTube. Here is his latest addition:



Another Novell employee, Russ Dastrup, seems to have just sort of joined him. Based in Mapleton (Utah), he describes himself as "Corporate Video guy at Novell. I especially love working on family video projects and fun internal company stuff." This probably counts as disclosure.

He has just uploaded two Novell ads. Here is the first:



Here is another new upload from him



All of these examples are just a few days old.

To summarise, Novell has people on its payroll who are manipulating Google search results (Novell-related queries) and also people who are passing Novell adverts to Google's YouTube.

"Did you know that I left Novell 11 months ago? I’m not part of the “Novell marketing people” that you seem to think I am. I parted ways with Novell for the very same reasons that you cite about the MS agreement–not its evilness, but the careless disregard for the people that the company never bothered to consult (including me)."

--Ted Haeger



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