SearchCap: The Day In Search, December 23, 2009

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

From Search Engine Land:

• Yahoo Paying Luggage Fees At Two Bay Area Airports
  

  Peace on earth, good will toward holiday travelers. That seems to be Yahoo’s modus operandi today: The company is paying the baggage fees for all outbound travelers at San Francisco and San Jose international airports. It’s part of the Yahoo for Good campaign, and as local news reports suggest, it’ll probably help build some goodwill [...]

• FTC To Take A Closer Look At Google-AdMob Transaction
  

  The 30-day window for the FTC’s review of Google’s $750 million acquisition of AdMob is now up and the regulatory agency has decided it’s going to take a closer look at the impact of the deal (”second request”) on the nascent but rapidly evolving mobile advertising sector. This means that the FTC will be gathering [...]

• Five Search Marketing Predictions For 2010
  

  Staring into a crystal ball is a dangerous undertaking, especially when you’re attempting to predict the future of a market as dynamic as paid search. Leading analysts continue to project that paid search marketing spend in the U.S. will grow from $13 billion in 2009 to $26 billion by the year 2014. But [...]

• 9 Clues That Your Branding Program Sucks
  

  Sometimes it’s difficult for non-marketers to reasonably gauge the overall success of branding programs, because they have neither dashboard nor perspective to use as benchmarks. This post suggests easy-to-identify measurements to serve as general indications of the marketing department’s success in building a brand (henceforth referred to as [brand]) to top of mind with [...]

• 6 New Years Resolutions For In-House SEMs
  

  Your resolution list might look different than this one, but that’s not the point. The point here is that you actually have an SEO resolution list. Either get cracking on those projects that stalled in 2009 and find your success by managing the work smartly, or use some of these ideas to jumpstart your 2010 [...]

• 5 Things On My B2B Wishlist For 2010
  

  It’s that time of year again where we tend to reflect on the past year and look forward to a fresh start. People are already writing some amazing content about great B2B articles in 2009, B2B social media predictions for 2010, and ideas for improving your B2B search results in 2010. I am going to take a [...]

• Cute: Yahoo Targets Former Employee Names on Google AdWords
  

  TechCrunch has screen shots of Google AdWords ads targeting Joshua Schachter’s name, a former well-knwon Yahoo employee, leading to Yahoo’s recruiting web site. In fact, Joshua Schachter tweeted about it yesterday, where he said, “yahoo’s running recruiting ads against my name. classy.” Soon later, Rasmus Lerdorf, another former Yahoo employee, tweeted he was [...]

• Core Principles For Life & Conversion Rate Optimization
  

  I’d like to humbly offer three steps to becoming a conversion rate optimization guru and a better person into the bargain. At first I thought I might like to write this post as a semi-comic (if I wrote it right) Glengarry Glen Ross style rant “A-B-C…A-always, B-be, C-conversion rate 0ptimizing,” but I decided that might give [...]

• Report: Yahoo To Close MyBlogLog
  

  ReadWriteWeb is reporting from “sources close to the project” that Yahoo will shut down MyBloglog next month. MyBlogLog doesn’t hold the blogging community’s attention today the way it did a few years ago, but if the report is true, it will disappoint many who continue to use the service. There was a time in 2006 when [...]

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• Yahoo! Mail – The Year in Review, ymailblog.com

Business Issues

• A Peek At ReachLocal’s $100 Million IPO Filing: It’s All About Building A Local Ad Sales Army, TechCrunch
• AOL’s Board Approves Restructuring; $150 Million in Severance Charges, paidContent.org
• ChaCha Raises Another $7 Million, TechCrunch
• Google Rests Its Defense of Executives in Italian Privacy Case, New York Times
• Google’s top inventor says talking computers are the future, SiliconRepublic.com
• Got Baggage? Let Yahoo Pick it Up, NBC Bay Area
• Yahoo’s Mobile Future ‘Unclear’, MediaPost

Local, Maps & Mobile

• Google Maps Adds New “Report A Problem” Link for Business Listing Spam & Errors, Mike Blumenthal
• QuickMark iPhone Update Fixes Google Favorite Places QR Code Decals, Search Engine Roundtable

Paid Search & Contextual

• Discover v2009: Location Extensions, AdWords API Blog
• Google AdSense Tests Searching For Targeted Ads in Console, Search Engine Roundtable

SEM Industry

• SEO Christmas Wishlist : Perfect Presents for an SEO, Search Engine Journal
• WebmasterWorld’s Tabke: Google "Stiffed" Webmasters on Christmas, Search Engine Roundtable

SEO & SEM

• URI canonicalization with an X-Canonical-URI HTTP header, sebastians-pamphlets.com
• How to Learn SEO, outspokenmedia.com
• Tools and Resources to Learn Google Advanced Operators, Search Engine Journal
• Top 5 Mistakes to Avoid when Writing and Testing PPC Text Ads, Clix Marketing PPC Blog
• Top Questions Asked on Google AdWords, Search Engine Roundtable

Social Media

• How to Use LinkedIn to Spam Business People, flyte blog
• The Movin’-on-Up Tour of New Twitter HQ in SF, Wall Street Journal

Video, Music & Image Search

• 2010 Video Marketing Predictions, vidiseo.com
• Image Search: Some Tips for Searching with the GazoPa (Beta), ResourceShelf

Web Analytics

• Defining A Web Analytics Strategy: A Manifesto, John Lovett
• Using Google Analytics as an Alternative to Website Optimizer, Search Engine People

Other Items

• Internet Users Now Spending an Average of 13 Hours a Week Online, harrisinteractive.com