SearchCap: The Day In Search, December 6, 2010
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: DecorMyEyes Merchant Vitaly Borker Arrested After NYT Piece On Google Rankings Just over a week ago, the New York Times introduced the world to Vitaly Borker, who boasted of being abusive […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
From Search Engine Land:
- DecorMyEyes Merchant Vitaly Borker Arrested After NYT Piece On Google Rankings
Just over a week ago, the New York Times introduced the world to Vitaly Borker, who boasted of being abusive to customers and claimed, inaccurately, that such behavior had a side benefit of producing good rankings in Google. Now another side benefit: Borker’s arrest. From an CNBC article on the arrest: Vitaly Borker, an alleged […]
- New Android Flagship Nexus S Comes Out Of Hiding
The Google Nexus S is out today. It was previewed incognito by Google CEO Eric Schmidt at Web 2.0 a few weeks ago. A Samsung Galaxy S-based handset running Android 2.3, it’s the new Android Flagship phone and reputedly best Android device out there — according to early reviews. We’ll get our proverbial mitts on […]
- Hot At Sphinn: Google’s Response To DecorMyEyes, LinkedIn Case Studies & More
It may come as no surprise that the news surrounding DecorMyEyes.com and Google’s response to the publicity it got dominated the activity on our sister site, Sphinn, last week. Beginning with the New York Times article, the story spread rapidly across the Internet; several stories reached Sphinn’s home page, and it was also the topic […]
- Black Friday & Cyber Monday Recap: Search Ads Drove Big Retail Gains
The dust seems to have finally settled on the long holiday weekend, and according to several reports both formal and informal, that dust is largely colored green. Green, as in money: transactions, average order size, revenue, and other metrics are widely reported as being up this year compared to 2009. Here’s a recap of several […]
- Going Head-To-Head With Amazon, Google Launches eBooks
Google has rolled out its long awaited digital ebooks program, the next step in the company’s ambitious but controversial project to scan and make searchable the estimated 130 million books that exist in print versions. “The next logical iteration for us is to open up a bookstore,” said Scott Dougall, product management director for Google […]
- Australian Police Drop Google WiFi Investigation
Saying it’s unlikely to get a conviction, the Australian Federal Police has given up its six-month investigation of Google’s collection of personal data over unsecure WiFi networks. In a statement issued Friday, the AFP says that Google’s activities “may have” broken the law, but that pursuing the matter further doesn’t make sense. Evidence exists to […]
- The Decor My Eyes Fiasco & Local Reviews Tactics
This past week, marketers the world over watched the “Decor My Eyes fiasco” unfold with horrified fascination. A ruthless online marketer gleefully mistreating customers in order to achieve higher rankings was a story we didn’t want to be true, but Google’s subsequent penalization action verified it was. The fiasco underscored the importance of reviews, particularly […]
- The First Google ChromeBooks May Appear This Week
Google is having a press event tomorrow and it’s focused on Chrome. There will likely be discussion of the Chrome browser app store. However much more interesting is the possibility that we’ll see the first Chrome OS netbooks “in the flesh,” so to speak. There has been conflicting information about whether these netbooks would appear […]
- AOL Scheming To Sell Itself To Yahoo?
This morning brings another report of AOL M&A machinations involving ways to merge with or be acquired by Yahoo, now that both sites have very similar missions and strategies. They’re in a way like the Ford and Chevy of the internet these days: workmanlike but not very glamorous. Maybe that’s unfair to Ford. Both Yahoo […]
- Is Google Changing Quality Score Rules Again?
In the past few months, two significant issues have been messing with AdWords quality scores—or at least with how many of us perceive quality scores. Google has developed several bugs in how it displays quality score. Keywords with low quality scores are acting like keywords with high quality scores. Google Quality Score Display Bugs Google’s […]
- Last Minute Holiday SEO Tactics
The holiday season is underway, and unfortunately many of us have waited for the last minute to attend to our SEO for the season. SEO for the holiday season really is best done in August, September or October. But what if you didn’t get to it this year? Is it too late? Not necessarily. There […]
- Google Christmas Trees & Kwanzaa Flag Joins Chanukah Dreidel
Last week, I showed how Google had a Chanukah Dreidel replace the basic everything icon on the left hand Google search results. But did you know that Google also has a Christmas Tree icon and Kwanzaa Flag icon? If you search for [christmas] or [kwanzaa] or [hanukkah] you will get a special everything icon. Standard […]
- Google’s New Social Sitelinks
Google is now showing social search related results in the Sitelinks section of the search results. The social sitelink includes your friend’s name, profile photo, and it links to your friend’s content on a particular website. For example, if I search for [twitter] on Google, I see Robert Scoble (scobleizer), Steve Rubel (steverubel), Israeli Consulate […]
- Wikileaks: Chinese Leaders’ Vanity Searches On Google Led To Hacking
I’m almost positive that one day we’ll see “Wikileaks: The Musical” on Broadway (or perhaps the Opera at The Met). There are equal measures of comedy, tragedy and intrigue in the many thousands of documents dumped and disclosed last week. It’s perfect fodder for dramatic adaptation. And one set of documents that embody all of […]
- Google, Bing & Searching For The New Wikileaks Website
Looking for the Wikileaks website? Having lost one domain, and having its second site going down temporarily, it’s a challenge, even for the search engines. Where’s Wikileaks? Yesterday, I wrote about how Google was still listing the old address for Wikileaks — wikileaks.org — in a search for wikileaks: That’s still the case today. Anyone […]
- Searching The Wikileaks Cablegate Archives With Cablesearch
Want to explore the “Cablegate” material that Wikileaks released last week for yourself, but have no idea where to start? There’s a new search engine for the material. Cablesearch: A Google For Cablegate Called Cablesearch, it’s a project from the Eccar: The European Center of Computer Assisted Reporting. Gary Price from ResourceShelf tipped us to […]
- Amazing: Groupon Rejects Google Mega-Offer
Groupon has apparently rejected the $5 billion-plus takeover bid by Google, electing to remain independent and probably go public later. AllThingsD is independently reporting that Groupon’s revenues are actually closer to $2 billion than the $500 million previously estimated. I was told several months ago by Groupon President Rob Solomon that the company was on […]
Search News From Around The Web:
Applications & Portal Features
- New Holiday Themes for My Yahoo!, My Yahoo! Blog
- Amazon adds Wikipedia to book-shopping pages, CNET News
Business Issues
- Facebook Director Of Monetization Tim Kendall Steps Down, TechCrunch
- Google’s $1 payment to Franklin Park couple was not about money, lawyer says, post-gazette.com
- Mark Zuckerberg Rocked On 60 Minutes (And The Winklevosses Looked, Well, Pathetic), Business Insider
- Twitter Goes After Twittersearch.com, TechCrunch
- IAC CFO: We Might Sell Ask.com in Pieces, TheStreet
- Rosetta Stone v. Google Appellate Briefs: Google’s Opening Brief and Rosetta Stone’s Unredacted Brief, Eric Goldman
Local, Maps & Mobile
- Google’s Possible “ 1″ iPhone App, Facebook Similarities, And Social “Loop” Groups, TechCrunch
- Android 2.3 Platform and Updated SDK Tools, Android Developers Blog
- TripAdvisor Reviews Missing from Google Places, Mike Blumenthal
Link Building
- Guest Blogging Tips: Link Baiting vs. Guest Posting, wiep.net
- Linkbuilding tactics: Getting the attention to get your article into the wrap up posts, State of Search
- What Are Your Best Tips for Link Builders?, SEOmoz
Paid Search & Contextual
- Magna: Global Online Ad Spend Will Overtake Newspapers By 2013, paidContent.org
- Four Steps To Get More Data from Google AdWords Call Metrics, Search Marketing Sage
- Google Product Listing Ads Not Tracking Conversions Properly, Search Engine Roundtable
Searching
- An Undocumented Google Search Operator – AROUND, Digital Inspiration
- Mathematica Becomes a Wolfram|Alpha Interface, Wolfram|Alpha Blog
- Press Review: Google’s eBookstore (Formerly Google Editions) is Now Live Online, ResourceShelf
SEO & SEM
- AdWords #PPC Hack 53: Exploiting Google Instant, AIM Clear Blog
- An Inside Look at How Microsoft Handles SEO Across its Massive Site, WebProNews
- Comprehensive 2010 SEO Guide to Keywords, BruceClay.com
- December 2010 Google Webmaster Report, Search Engine Roundtable
Social Media
- ‘New’ Twitter Font Appears In Promoted Tweet For Black Eyed Peas, Forbes
- Facebook Shares Only Gain 1.2% Since Last Week, TechCrunch
- Facebook Testing New Registration Social Plugin, All Facebook
- Introducing the New Profile, Facebook
- Why LinkedIn Is the Social Network That Will Never Die, Ad Age
- Why Twitter Singled Out TwitterSearch.com, domainnamewire.com
- Marketing content with social media: tweet this!, SEO Copywriting
- Sure You Can Fake It In Social Media – So Don’t, Search Engine People
Recent Hot Items From Sphinn, Our Social News Sharing Site:
- Borker Arrested: Alleged 'Bully' Online Retailer Arrested in New York – Remember the jerk who claimed in the NYT to have boosted his Google rankings with negative reviews and openly communicated bad customer service? It seems the NYPD just took the fun out of his business.
- Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village [Video Spoof] – Finally! A way to opt out of Google. A hilarious video news spoof story from The Onion.
- AdWords #PPC Hack 53: Exploiting Google Instant – Recently, aimClear, along with a handful of industry colleagues, took a few spirited cracks at hacking Google Instant to see if they could somehow break it, to the PPC marketer’s advantage.The results were fascinating!
- Linkbuilding tactics: Getting the attention to get your article into the wrap up posts – Bas van den Beld goes into the depth of an interesting approach on chasing high quality links: Getting into the wrap pup posts can be very profitable, but it is not something which is done very easily. The influentials, the editors responsible for these posts, all take their jobs very seriously. So if you want to get in there, you will have to take your job seriously too. Start of with quality and get noticed. Then both you and the editors will be happy. You will have your post mentioned, they will have another quality post to put into theirs.
- How Facebook Connect Freaks Me Out – Danny Sullivan tries to figure out exactly what data may or may not be accessed when all you want to do is log on to a site via Facebook Connect.
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