Accused of failing to follow safety procedures for offshore drilling, BP doesn’t help its case in our eyes by ignoring well-established best practices for search marketing.

BP’s ads in the results for “Oil Spill” on Google, Yahoo and Bing are poorly executed in almost every way.

In Google the headline space is wasted with the company name, already a synonym for “oil spill.” In Yahoo the headline reads “Oil Spills” — a keyword insertion accident, maybe? In Bing the headline is “British Petroleum.” That’ll drive some clicks!

Bing and Yahoo show the vanity URL www.bp.com/gulfofmexicoresponse. At the speed of search, this reads as exactly nothing.

The body of all three ads uses title case for no apparent reason, detracting from the intended seriousness of the message. Lack of punctuation between the two sentences cements the impression of a company insufficiently strategic to protect its own reputation.

And all that’s before you even get to the landing page.