SearchCap: The Day In Search, January 28, 2011

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

• AdWords Homepage Gets More Modular, Customizable

  Google has redesigned the homepage for its AdWords advertiser interface in an effort to bring more relevant, customized information up front for marketers. The main change for the “home” tab is that advertisers can create their own modules based on saved filters created on the campaign interface. Filters let advertisers identify problems with their campaigns, […]
• Bing Travel Now Offers Destination Comparison Tool

  Some day, the McGee family is going to pack our bags and hightail it to Hawaii. We’ve never been there and would love to spend a week or two on the beaches, in the mountains, and enjoying the weather. But we have no idea which island to visit. Sound familiar? Maybe you want to to […]

• Google Launches Algorithm To Fight Content Spam

  Earlier this week, Google’s Matt Cutts announced they will be releasing a new on-page spam detection technique to reduce the amount of content spam we see in Google. Matt Cutts just confirmed the rumors that this algorithm is indeed live. Matt said the change to their algorithm to prevent content spam in Google’s index was […]

• Search In Pics: Google Mannequins, Google Voice Signs & Freezing Yahoo

  In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more. Google Mannequins In Server Racks: Google Voice Pick Up Lines: Google’s New Venice Beach Office: Freezing […]

• Applying Customer Life time Value To Paid Search

  Online marketers have realized that traditional metrics such as sales, brand wareness, attitudes etc., are not enough to show return on investment. In fact, some academic studies have shown that marketing actions that improve short term sales may actually harm long term profitability of a brand. Further, with improvements in data mining and warehousing, marketers […]

• Microsoft Q2 Revs Almost $20 Billion, “Bing Division” Still Losing Money Despite Search Revenue Increase

  Microsoft announced second quarter earnings yesterday, which beat Wall Street’s expectations. The company reported a lot of good news about its revenues, profits and products, including Windows (PC) 7, Kinect/Xbox and Office. However Online Services, which houses all Microsoft’s online operations including MSN and Bing, posted a $543 million loss. That’s up from $463 a […]

• Interview With TAT’s Hampus Jakobsson On Digital Natives & Digital Immigrants

  For my past several columns, I’ve presented a number of interviews exploring where search might go in the future. Through that process, I ran across an interesting video from a company based in Sweden called TAT*, short for The Astonishing Tribe. The “Tribe” helps create unique user experiences that keep up with the rapidly evolving […]

• Search Week: January 24, 2011

  Search Week is an exclusive weekly newsletter for Search Engine Land premium members that recaps stories covered on Search Engine Land over the past week. Below are top stories organized by topic that happened over the past week. Each topic (or Search Engine Land column) is also a link, where you can click through and […]

• Search Week: January 17, 2011

  Search Week is an exclusive weekly newsletter for Search Engine Land premium members that recaps stories covered on Search Engine Land over the past week. Below are top stories organized by topic that happened over the past week. Each topic (or Search Engine Land column) is also a link, where you can click through and […]

• Schmidt Downplays Google’s Competition With Facebook, Apple & Well … Almost Everything

  Speaking today at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, outgoing Google CEO Eric Schmidt deflected suggestions that Google is in competition with the likes of Apple and Facebook, and rejected speculation that those fights are the real reason that Larry Page is taking the CEO’s chair. As Forbes reports, Schmidt told journalists that his […]

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• This week in Docs: Quick starring, justify paragraph in the toolbar and improved sharing invitation, Official Google Docs Blog

Business Issues

• Has Larry Page doomed Google?, ZDNet
• Ed Vaizey hears MP’s concerns over Google monopoly – Google presents new ‘Google-everything’, TechEye
• The 3 most important things I learned from Google (part 2), Steve’s blog
• Twitter Blog: The Tweets Must Flow, Twitter Blog
• What are Demand Media’s secret “agreements” with Google?, BlogStorm
• Yahoo VP Leaving For Groupon, WebProNews

Link Building

• Always Be Linking: 8 Places B2B Marketers Might Miss Link Opportunities, KoMarketing Associates
• Interlinking Your Sites – Whiteboard Friday, SEOmoz
• Keyword Specific Ranking with Internal Linking, Search Engine People

Local, Maps & Mobile

• Microsoft: Consumers Should Think Twice Before Broadcasting Location, mobilized.allthingsd.com

Searching

• Bing Trends…Academy Awards, www.bing.com
• Making your travel plans? We can help with that…, www.bing.com
• Wolfram|Alpha Meets MathWorld, Wolfram|Alpha Blog

SEM Industry

• Video: Google Targeting Content Farms, Spams Themselves & Bing’s Squirrel Images, Search Engine Roundtable

SEO & SEM

• Don’t Let Duplicate Pages and Bad URLs Destroy Your SEO: Kill It Dead! (Part 2 of 3), Search Engine Guide
• How Organized Spam is Taking Control of Google’s Search Results, SEOmoz
• How to Deal with Dynamic URLs, Vertical Leap Blog
• Keyword Specific Ranking with Internal Linking, Search Engine People

Social Media

• Quora Blocks Startup Search Engines, Read/Write Web
• 5 LinkedIn Marketing Tips for Companies, Online Marketing Blog
• Facebook Ups Application Security with Roles, Whitelists, and Notifications, Inside Facebook
• The Future of Mixx Social Voting: An Interview, nowsourcing.com

Video, Music & Image Search

• Google Image Search Indexes SVG Files, Google Operating System

Recent Hot Items From Sphinn, Our Social News Sharing Site:

• Matt Cutts Announcement: Algorithm change launched – The friendly Google Engineer has announced a tweak to the algo that is intended to combat content mills that scrape original content and present it as their own.
• Spam 3.0, The Evolution of Search and the Future of SEO – Does Google support Spam 3.0, and by the way what is Spam 3.0? For an answer digest this excellent essay about the evolution of so-called WebSpam and the future of SEO by Aaron Bradley.
• Google On Comment Spamming For Links – Not earth shaking, BUT I have seen too much chatter about social links passing PR, that this needs to be highlighted; "Links that use the rel=nofollow microformat do not pass PageRank and are not used in our ranking algorithms. " – m'kay? Move along. Nothing to see here.
• SEO Not Working For You? Here’s Why – Lisa Barone provides some great insights into why an SEO campaign might not be "working", not the least of which is the fact that SEO is a marathon, not a sprint.
• This Week in Content Farms – A wild week that started with Matt Cutts statements about content farms and ended with a massively successfully Demand Media IPO. Making sense of a critical week in content farming.
• Welcome to Sphinn’s (Nine) New Editors! – Please join me in giving a warm welcome to Sphinn's new editors — all nine of them! We're thrilled to have them on board and helping us publish the best Internet marketing content and discussions possible on our home page.