SearchCap: The Day In Search, February 9, 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:

• Super Bowl Sparks Twitter Record For Sporting Event

  Fans watching the final few moments of the Super Bowl last weekend set a new record for Tweets-per-second (TPS) for a sporting event: 4,064 Tweets were sent at 10:07:16 p.m. EST, according to Twitter. The previous TPS record, of 3,283, was set during Japan’s 3-1 win over Denmark during the World Cup soccer tournament last […]

• Google Switches AdWords Color Back To Yellow From Purple

  In July 2010, Google changed the color of the AdWords background from yellow to purple. Now, less 7 months after the switch, it appears Google has gone back to the yellow color. Here is a screen shot of the yellow background color from today and directly below it a screen shot of the purple color […]

• Google: We’re Better Now Than 2000. Okay, Let Us Test It!

  Google’s Matt Cutts wrote a blog post comparing a “time capsule” of search results he saved from Google’s index in 2000 to the search results in Google today. He showed how for that search query, Google has tremendously improved in terms of spam and search quality.Most SEOs in the business will admit that “gaming” Google […]

• Keynoting SMX West: Steven Levy, The Man Who Found Einstein’s Brain (& Is Looking At Google’s)

  Headline grab your attention? True story: Steven Levy, one of our keynote speakers at SMX West actually found Einstein’s brain 22 years after the great scientist’s death. But that’s not the main reason he’s keynoting—Steven has spent the past two years as an “embedded” journalist at the Googleplex, attending strategy and development meetings, interviewing key […]

• Google Will Make $10 Per Android User In 2012: Report

  A number of reports out underscore how strategic mobile is now for Google’s business. The first, from IDC, says that there were more smartphones shipped in Q4 than PCs. Think about that. And earlier analyst reports found that tablets (read: iPad) have cut into PC sales. The PC era is now officially over. PCs will […]

• B2B Lead Generation Via Search Marketing (Part I)

  According to a recent Marketing Sherpa report, the top 3 marketing challenges facing B2B marketers today are: Generating high quality leads Generating a high volume of leads, and Dealing with lengthening sales cycles This column explores how business marketers are tackling these tough issues in terms of their search marketing efforts. B2B Budgets Continue To […]

• Excuse Me While I Have A Ranking Report Rant

  I had lunch today with a young, ambitious entrepreneur. He’s fresh out of a prestigious tech university, has a fledgling company and visions of shaking up a big industry. He wanted to talk about search. Him: “I’m pretty psyched, we just launched about 4 months ago and we’re already ranking number one for <insert obscure […]

• 7 Things To Teach Your Children About Conversion

  If we want our children to grow up healthy and happy, we can’t be squeamish about addressing issues of conversion scenarios, analytics packages, value propositions, storytelling, split testing and personas. We must arm our children with these tools, or the Web will continue to bore and repel us.

• Facebook’s 2010 Metrics: Dominant & Still Growing, comScore Says

  Total unique Facebook visitors in 2010? Up 38 percent. Average daily Facebook visitors in 2010? Up 69 percent. Total Facebook page views in 2010? Up 71 percent. Overall time spent on Facebook in 2010? Up 79 percent. The list could go on and on. In fact, it does. Here’s a look at comScore’s estimates for […]

• 7 Tips To Use Paid Search To Unite Brands During A Merger

  Do you recall the merger of AT&T and Cingular Wireless back in 2007? At the time, experts questioned AT&T’s decision to retire Cingular’s brand name. After all, it was very popular. But now the AT&T brand is stronger than ever, and hardly anyone remembers the brand they cut. When faced with a merger today, marketers […]

• Yahoo BOSS Moves From Yahoo’s Index to Microsoft’s, Adds Pay Structure

  Yahoo has just announced that they’re about to launch a new version of BOSS with a fee structure based on query volume. (The initial version launched in 2008 was free, and a fee structure for high volume use was first talked about in 2009). Yahoo BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service) provides an API that […]

• Mahalo’s Calacanis: Time To End The Content Farm Arms Race

  No stranger to controversy, Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis threw down a gauntlet at his “content farm” competitors, arguing they’re polluting the web and angering Google, to the detriment of searchers and their own companies. Calacanis made his remarks during an “Ending The Content Arms Race” talk at FM’s Signal LA event. My semi-live blogging of […]

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• New Firefox Beta Makes Opting Out of Ad Tracking Easy (Once Advertisers Actually Support It), NewsGrange

Business Issues

• EBay to Unveil Plan to Help PayPal Repel Google, Apple Threats, BusinessWeek
• Exclusive: Andreessen Horowitz Invests $80 Million in Twitter, AllThingsD

Local, Maps & Mobile

• Google Gets Heavy-Handed In Local Search, smallbiztrends.com
• Google Mobile Ads: Looking For More Engagement, mocoNews
• Mobile best practice: Separate out mobile campaigns for improved performance, Google Mobile Ads Blog
• More Google Maps Spam Leading To Call Girl Service, Search Engine Roundtable

Link Building

• Backlink History Tool Video Tutorial, blog.majesticseo.com

Paid Search & Contextual

• New Interface Wednesdays: Quickly view your total earnings, Inside AdSense

SEO & SEM

• AOL and Huffington Post merger: Search engine optimization won’t work forever., Slate
• Keyword Research – Using Categories to Make Your Process More Actionable, SEOmoz
• Quick Tips for Optimizing Your Google Places Page, BruceClay.com
• eHow and Mahalo: How Many Keyword Variations is Too Many?, Adam Sherk
• Google To Fix Change Of Address Bug: Restricted to root domains only, Search Engine Roundtable
• Google’s Updating Again: SEO Chatter On Ranking Changes, Search Engine Roundtable
• Intelligent Site Structure for better SEO, Yoast

Social Media

• Facebook Rolls Out Major Upgrades To Their Ad System, allfacebook.com
• How Small and Local Businesses Can Use Facebook, Michael Gray
• Only 27% of Top 100 Retailers Use the Facebook Like Button, blindfiveyearold.com

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

• DOTW: Can Marketers Ignore the Facebook Opportunity? – There are many businesses that survive just fine without doing PPC advertising, and many that do fine without focusing much on SEO. Studies suggest a combination of SEO and PPC is the best, but companies have been making it work for years by focusing on just one and ignoring the other. But what about Facebook? Can you ignore it? Considering its enormous reach — which is still growing according to the stats published this week — our "Discussion of the Week" asks, is advertising/marketing on Facebook a must in 2011?
• SERP Sniffing – A Long Tail Keyword Strategy – A great article explaining how the data received from running a black hat campaign can help your long term white hat SEO campaign.
• HuffPo's Achilles Heel – Search Engine Optimization Won't Work Forever – Farhad Manjoo at Slate ponders the long term viability of what has to date been a successful strategy in garnering eyeballs for the Huffington Post (oh and thousands of other sites). From the article: "Not all SEO is bad, and not all HuffPo articles employ shady SEO, but some of the tricks that HuffPo uses to gin up search traffic are pretty sketchy. These tricks include: stuffing articles with strings of meaningless keywords (HuffPo does this on every piece), repeating potential search queries at the top of a story, and carefully engineering articles in response to rising search terms. These tactics exploit obvious weaknesses in Google and other search engines. If Google's mission is to provide search results that you—a human being—find useful, then HuffPo's keyword-glutted pieces don't belong, because no human being considers a list of synonyms an interesting way to start an article."