SearchCap: The Day In Search, August 26, 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:

• Google Signals Upcoming Algorithm Change, Asks For Help With Scraper Sites

  Google is calling for help in identifying a long-running problem: scraper sites in its search results — and particularly scraper sites that are ranking higher than the original page. Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s spam fighting group, put out the call for help on Twitter this morning: Scrapers getting you down? Tell us about […]
• AdWords Editor Version 9.5 Released For Windows And Mac

  Google has released version 9.5 of its free desktop software for managing AdWords campaigns, adding support for campaign experiments and location extensions, among other recent enhancements to the AdWords web interface. Users can now manage their campaign experiments on the AdWords Editor, including applying and editing an experiment status, a default maximum CPC or a […]

• Search In Pics: Google + Pin, Zoogle Water & Matt Cutts Panda

  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. GooglePoly: Zoogle: Google’s Adam Lasnik: Google + Pins: Matt Cutts & His Toy Panda:

• Pew: 65% Of Online Adults Now Use Social Networks

  It comes as no surprise that social networking is one of the top online activities, exceeded only by email and search according the Pew Internet Project. The most noteworthy finding of a new Pew report on social networking is that its growth is most pronounced among older Americans: The frequency of social networking site usage […]

• A New Google Rich Snippet For Real Estate, Other Business Listings

  It appears Google is testing a new type of rich snippet for displaying real estate and other types of business listings. I reported this at the Search Engine Roundtable and included a few pictures from various sources. The rich snippet, which is not yet confirmed by Google, seems to show real estate listings as well […]

• Are You Using Filters To Keep Your Analytics Data Honest?

  Data is a fickle friend. It is only as reliable as the setup you have and the effort you put into understanding the numbers. There are so many variables that can kill your data, and fixing the things that are broken is always a process of elimination. I can tell you that most skewed data […]

• Google Retires The Googlebot-News Bot

  Today, Google announced that they will no longer be crawling news sites with Googlebot-News and instead will crawl news sites with Googlebot, the same bot that crawls sites for web search. However, you can still block your content from being indexed in Google News by disallowing Googlebot-News in robots.txt or using a meta robots tag. […]

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• Google signs up three schools for Chromebooks, 9to5Google

Business Issues

• Max Levchin to Leave Google As Slide Is Shut Down, allthingsd.com
• Watch Live Here: Eric Schmidt’s Edinburgh Keynote And Twitter Reaction, paidContent.org

Local, Maps & Mobile

• Not Just Reviews … Now They’re “Google Reviews”, Small Business SEM

Link Building

• Wikipedia Selling Links For $5000, Boom Online Marketing

Searching

• Google Search Box Not Inserting Cursor In Search Box For Some, Search Engine Roundtable

SEM Industry

• Michael Mozart of JeepersMedia Interviews Barry Schwartz, RustyBrick Blog
• Video: The Big Content Purge, Google Interfaces, Real Estate Snippets, DOJ & Google & More, Search Engine Roundtable

SEO & SEM

• 7 Current Trends in SEO To Improve Your Ranking, Search Engine People
• Possible New Google Search Result Annotations, SEO By The Sea
• Using Other Blogs and Writers to Boost Your SEO, Search Engine People

Social Media

• Google+ launches an “ignore” option. Hide people but let them interact with your content, thenextweb.com
• Nobody Uses Their Real Name Online, and Other Outdated Notions, Gizmodo

Web Analytics

• Site Search Analytics: What Your Customers Want…In Their Own Words, Search Engine Guide

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

• The money has been spent, what now? 5 steps to iterate content development for results – Nice post about how to better existing content by adding rich media, using Google sets, and utilizing SEOMoz's LDA tool (currently in labs) using a real-life example.
• Is the Tail Killing Your Bing PPC Program? – Could low volume, low cost keywords decelerate an entire ad group?
• Broken Link Building In Action: REAL Email Example Inside! – Broken link building is the talk of the link industry at the moment. Nick LeRoy gives us the basic method along with a real-life example of how this concept works.
• Google Plus alters the landscape of Google Image search – Read this *BEFORE* you comment on that funny (but somewhat risque) photo on G+ :)