The search engine industry is never shy about embracing the various holiday activities, even if the day being celebrated is strictly a Hallmark event; and Valentine’s Day is no exception. From a minor logo alteration to perhaps a Super Bowl/Veronica Mars marriage proposal, many search pundits turn their creative juices up a little more if the day(s) has some significance to it.

Not only do the gurus provide holiday flair, the search engines themselves usually join in the celebratory fun by debuting logos following the particular holiday theme, with the most obvious being Google. As expected, Google introduced a Valentine-flavored logo featuring a chocolate covered strawberry as the lower case “g” and “l”. However, they were not the only engine to feature a heart-shaped theme.

Ask.com also joined in the Hallmark holiday fun by using a Valentine’s heart as their search button while Yahoo uses a Flash animated couple seeking cover from a rain storm mixed with red hearts… so all in all, it was a nice celebration of a questionable holiday. I’m also not surprised that Live.com/MSN stayed out the mix either. Their current design isn’t very modification friendly.

As for the search bloggers, the heart-shaped cake was once again taken by Chris Hooley (who admits being inspired by Rand Fishkin). Because Hooley doesn’t seem to have a date for today’s celebration, he’s holding a “Who Wants To Date An SEO” competition - a move that may cause the opposite sex to start an all-out war while the victor is determined. The entry rules are as follows:

Sign up, or sign a friend up. You will receive an affiliate ID soon thereafter, and a link to a page with a counter with your affiliate ID attached once upon launch of the contest. Once the contest starts, there will be a period of 3 weeks while hits are tallied up on you or your friend’s counter. At the end of the contest, the person with the most hits on their counter wins. Easy.

So if you are interested in making a lonely SEO, um, not lonely, get over there and sign up. The day of the date won’t be announced until there are at least 20 so don’t delay… especially if you are curious when the event is going to happen.

What do you do if you are a known search engine marketer who doesn’t shy away from ruffling feathers of the search engine optimization community and said community decides to have a competition in your name in an effort to disprove some of the claims you’ve made?

Well, if you are Dave Pasternack, you engage these combatants on their own ground and try to beat them at their own game… something that seems to be working for the controversial President of Dit-it Marketing.

As pointed out by IncrediBILL over at his fiendishly named blog - Dave Pasternack News and IncrediBILL’s Random Rants - Pasternack is in a position to win the competition designed to point out the errors in his thinking. Currently, the Dave Pasternack about me page (more on this in a moment) from Did-it.com is number 2 in the Google rankings for the same keyphrase.

When Threadwatch’s competition first kicked off, Pasternack’s about me wasn’t even on the front page of these same Google results. With that in mind, the question becomes, how did Pasternack effect such a change in Google’s results?

The major alteration was done when Pasternack (or the Did-it webmaster) developed a new about me page that improved the keyword content while making minor but noticeable changes to the page’s title tags. The Did-It index page also features a “Dave Pasternack” link that points to the new and improved about me page (view the old one).

What I’m curious about is do Pasternack’s relatively minor changes help prove his thesis about SEO not being rocket-science? If you can improve your search position that drastically by simply changing some text, title tags and by adding one backlink (MSN is the only engine to list a substantial backlink count; Yahoo shows 88 and Google shows their standard goose egg), it makes you wonder just how hard the SEO exercise really is…

Of course, Dave Pasternack is not the most competitive keyword phrase in the world, either.

Because I’ve been away on secret missions (not really, but it sounds good), there are a few stories that slipped through the net - like the Jennifer Laycock/National Pork Board hubbub that made the rounds recently.

In case you briefly retired from the blogosphere and perhaps missed the story, Jennifer, a noted SEO specialist and breast feeding activist (hence the term “lactivist“) was served with a cease and desist letter from the protectors of the pork trademark because of a CafePress t-shirt celebrating mothers who breastfeed.

The shirt causing all the drama made use of the caption “The Other White Milk,” which plays off the Pork Board’s trademarked slogan, “The Other White Meat”. If you’d like a full recap of the events leading up to this article, please read Jennifer’s thorough explanation.

While the situation began with a litigious approach, both parties have reached an agreement allowing Jennifer to sell a shirt similar to the one that initiated the Pork Board’s (over?)reaction.

These actions and reactions again demonstrate the viral power a well-maintained blog can have. Granted, Jennifer’s Lactivist blog wasn’t used as the primary source of communication between the two parties, but it was the conduit where the rest of us learned and reported about the situation.

Not surprisingly, once the initial story broke, the majority of the bloggers who cover this type of thing were firmly in Jennifer’s camp and I have to believe that played a part in the Pork Board’s decision to bring the situation to an understanding that was mutually beneficial. Jennifer’s follow-up post does a great job relaying the pork industry’s point of view:

I want to make it clear to my readers that based off of our contact with the staff at the National Pork Board it is quite clear to me that they were extremely upset that anyone would feel they were not supportive of nursing mothers. The fact that the staff has dug into their own pockets in order to make a contribution strikes me as extremely generous and I think that they should be applauded for their response to this issue.

The whole Pork Board/Lactivist deal clearly demonstartes both sides of the viral fence. When the story first hit, many bloggers took the pork industry to task. Now that an understanding has been reached, Jennifer is making sure to give the Pork Board credit where it’s due, and in true blogger fashion, others are following suit.

So while some may question whether or not social media optimization is worthwhile (remember kids, buzz may be fleeting, but links are almost forever), there should be no denying social media does have influence, especially when bloggers rally around one of their own.

While it’s fair to say this Sunday’s Super Bowl XLI doesn’t need any help in the way of promotion, that doesn’t mean the strong arm of the social media “association” (the blogosphere) hasn’t embraced the event wholeheartedly… and that’s including the advertising portion.

Before we touch on the marketing aspects of Super Bowl Sunday ($2.6 million for a 30-second spot), the coverage prior to the game should be mentioned as well. Because of the two-week delay between the conference finals and the final game, writers and bloggers alike have a great deal of time to discuss just about every facet of what makes the Super Bowl, well, super.

One such sports blog - Deadspin - attacked this opportunity with a zeal rarely seen around the ole ’sphere; and because of AJ Daulerio’s superhuman efforts, we now have some of the best pre-Super Bowl coverage anyone can ask for. Daulerio’s focused primarily on the circus that makes up the various media days each team has to deal with while preparing for the big game… well, that and the infinite celebrity/professional athlete-laced parties that also took place.

This particular Daulerio entry seems to capture the week’s mood quite nicely.

However, media coverage of the media coverage (and everything else that entailed) is not the only way a viral outlet has been used to embrace the Super Bowl. As you know, the game itself is not the only reason the event gets so much hype. Another one of the primary reasons for tuning in is to see the commercials by various different companies willing to pay such extremely large amounts of money to get word out about their products.

During the last few Super Bowls, a number of Internet-based companies have thrown their hat (along with their advertising budget) into this expensive ring, with GoDaddy and Monster.com probably the most memorable.

This year, some of the growing Web 2.0 Internet companies are doing Super Bowl ads as well, but they aren’t going through the NFL or CBS. Instead, these companies are using probably one of the most powerful viral Internet tools on the planet: YouTube.com.

A group consiting of Technorati, meebo, Meez, Multiply, Plaxo, and RockYou.com has decided against paying the astronomical fees associated with advertising during the Super Bowl. What they did was start a YouTube channel called SuperDotComAdsXLI that features commercials for each company (there’s even one for Technorati’s WTF feature that makes brilliant use of The Big Lebowski).

Aside - YouTube is also having an event that’s planned around the Super Bowl commercials called SuperVote, which starts after the game ends.

Obviously, these examples provide only the smallest glimpse of the coverage XLI is getting, even from the blogosphere. From Daluerio’s balls-out coverage to making commercials for the game without paying the price, from a social media perspective, the Super Bowl is quite the cornucopia.

Update: Another popular sports blog - Kissing Suzy Kolber (named after this incident) - posted a video from ESPN that clearly demonstrates just how popular many of these blogs are becoming.