If you’re Kevin Bidwell, the now infamous small business owner of All-in-one-Business.com, your new found notorariety for outranking Goolge for the terms Google Adsense and Adsense might be more like “a tempest in a teapot,” according to the veteran business consultant.

As might be expected, there’s great irony in the fact Google’s own program URL has been hijacked as a result of using a simple meta refresh redirect. Some have theorized that this situation has revealed an exploitable hole in Google’s Bourbon update. Not likely since most serps haven't had a good glub of Bourbon just yet. Regardless, Mr. Bidwell’s celebrity has been anything but celebrated with accusations of malicious intent ranging from spamming the engines and phishing to outright hijacking by some slightly envious webmasters and SEO pros who’ve flooded message boards and blogs concerning the news of his site generating the top position and a PR9 in the Goolge serps.

The fuss started around May 20th and has more or less subsided with his page no longer visible in the top search engine results pages.

Is Kevin Bidwell a BlackHat? Was the hijack intentional? You decide but keep in mind that the keyword “adsense” appeared a total of 59 times over the past 60 days in Wordtracker’s database. The real truth seems to fall somewhere between his virtue (skill) or fortune (luck) with luck playing a greater role in our hero's recent fate. Machiavelli would of been absolutely proud.

You might be surprised to learn that Mr. Bidwell is not that keen on search engine marketing. Kevin’s a smart sales and direct response marketing consultant who launched his first online business in January 2001. While he did notice a boost in traffic from all the publicity – approximately 6,000 to 7,000 new visits – Kevin’s not interested in just traffic. “I care about dollars per visitor. Traffic is somewhat irrelevant."

“We rely on direct mail and direct email to generate leads. We do very little search engine marketing. About 10% of our traffic does comes from a small group of phrases,” noted Kevin as he qualified the source of his sites’ 2,000 to 3,000 daily visitors.

“Search engine marketing is not always the most effective way to market a company especially if you’re in a very competitive category. Staying in the top position isn’t easy when someone from Tulsa decides they want to be #1,” added Kevin.

Instead, Kevin’s leveraging the power of article marketing using PR7 backlinks from content he creates to support solid indexing of pages important to his business. You can read his interview here.

Kevin jokes that his next search conquest will be for the term MSN on MSN. I can't wait....

Todd