SearchCap: The Day In Search, January 13, 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:

• How To Optimize A Mobile AdWords Campaign
  

  Google is going mobile in a big way. Following the announcement of Nexus One, the official Google phone, and the acquisition of adMob, Google is ready to make some serious moves on the small screen. Early days of mobile advertising Before smart phones hit the market, mobile advertisers were confined to the small screens of traditional mobile [...]

• Harvard Professor Details New, ‘Insidious’ Form Of Google Click Fraud
  

  One of Google’s more vocal critics says the company should cut its ties with InfoSpace over what he calls “a particularly insidious kind of click fraud” that involves a fairly complex combination of paid ads, affiliate traffic brokering, and spyware. Harvard assistant professor Ben Edelman also wants Google to repay the affected advertisers and be [...]

• SMX West Speaker Pitch Form Closing
  

  Want to speak at SMX West? Don’t delay—we’re closing the pitch form for most sessions THIS FRIDAY, January 15. View the agenda here: http://searchmarketingexpo.com/west/2010/agenda And the speaking pitch instructions and form here: http://searchmarketingexpo.com/speaker-form Want to increase your chances of being selected to speak? Read the blog post Want To Speak @ SMX West? Here’s How for tips on what [...]

• Nielsen: Yahoo, Bing Down, Google Up in December
  

  Nielsen has released its December 2009 search engine rankings. They reflect gains by Google and a minor gain by AOL compared with November 2009. The data show declines by Yahoo and Bing. Here is the chart:

  Compare data from November:

  And finally, compare comScore’s November search rankings:

  I think there can be no argument now that Yahoo has [...]

• Google’s China Gambit: Day Two Reaction
  

  Google’s decision to potentially pull out of China if it cannot operate without censorship is a remarkable story. The statement was made after Google discovered a “highly sophisticated and targeted attack” on GMail. Google didn’t say the Chinese government was behind the attacks but that’s the clear implication. The attacks involved more than just Google [...]

• Google Ranks Real-Time Tweets Based On Followers?
  

  The Technology Review magazine has an article named How Google Ranks Tweets. They interviewed Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow, who led development of Google’s real-time search, on the topic. Amit explained that in the social context, the number of people following someone is similar to the number of links pointing to a page. [...]

• AdWords Display URL Policy Change For Hosted Domains
  

  The Google AdWords blog announced a new change to their display URL policy for ads leading to hosted domains. The change is fairly simple, if you are hosted on a blogspot.com, wordpress.com or similar type of domain, Google wants you to show the subdomain portion of the domain, in addition to the main domain. For [...]

• The Five Core Patterns Of Conversion Marketing
  

  How many basic web patterns are there? If you were to boil every web site down to a set of core species, how many would you list? Would there be 500 basic types? 100? 50? How about five? Conversion scientists require some categorization and classification to do their job well. This allows us to simplify rather complex [...]

• The Coming Decade & In-House Search Marketing’s Coming of Age
  

  In October of 2000 a start-up company launched a self-service ad program with 350 customers. The company was Google and the program was, of course, AdWords. While practitioners of SEM were then relatively rare, those employed full-time by companies to optimize websites for search engines were almost unheard-of. Some ten years [...]

• Choosing Between In-House & Outsourcing B2B SEM
  

  B2B managers need to figure out the best way to manage SEO efforts. One key decision is whether to bring SEO in-house or outsource. Your choices usually look something like this:

  Hire an in-house SEO employee Work with an individual SEO consultant Outsource to a search engine marketing (SEM) agency

  Typically this decision is not conducted using [...]

• SEMPO Seeking Candidates For Board Of Directors
  

  SEMPO, the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, is seeking candidates for its Board of Directors. Terms for the current board members expire in March. SEMPO is hosting a webinar this week to explain more about the requirements and responsibilities of being a board member, as well as the nomination and election process for its board. The [...]

• Google Just Says No To China: Ending Censorship, Due To Gmail Attack
  

  Google has revealed that the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists were targeted last December in a hacking attempt. That, along with other issues, has convinced the company that it will no longer censor results China as the Chinese government wishes. In particular, Google has willingly allowed self-censored its search results since January 27, 2006, [...]

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• On how Google Wave surprisingly changed my life, maxklein.posterous.com
• Default https access for Gmail, Official Gmail Blog

Business Issues

• Google to Announce Fourth Quarter 2009 Financial Results, Google
• Another Ad Shakeup At AOL: Seth Leaves After 90 Days; Fellows To Head Global Ad Products, paidContent.org
• Baidu.tw Wasn’t Hacked To Show Google, Doesn’t Even Belong To Baidu, TechCrunch
• Mail.ru Removed Yandex Search but Google Is Not Getting the Market Share Anyway, Profy

Local, Maps & Mobile

• 100 Listings Per Google Local Business Center, Search Engine Roundtable
• Google’s Nexus One phone sells a mere 20,000 in its first week, VentureBeat
• New for the iPhone: Watch Congress in Real Time, ResourceShelf

Link Building

• Getting Links for a Poker site is easier than you think, Cornwallseo.com

Paid Search & Contextual

• AdSense for Domains Expands Use of Keyword Hints, Inside AdSense

Searching

• BBC Begins to Roll Out Enhanced Search Services to Web Site, Blog Post Provides Excellent Background About the Project, ResourceShelf

SEO & SEM

• 11 Conversion Rate Optimization Lessons Learned in 2009 (and annual moz traffic stats), SEOmoz
• Google News Page Size Limit Is 256 KB, Search Engine Roundtable
• Google Plusbox Thoughts, Periscopix
• Is Amazon.com Cloaking : Serving Google Different Content?, Search Engine Roundtable
• UTM Clutter Killer, sebastians-pamphlets.com
• Where Is My Google Reconsideration Request Response?, Search Engine Roundtable
• Will Your CMS Cause Paid Search Problems?, Search Engine Journal

Social Media

• Yesterday Was Twitter’s Highest Usage Day Ever. Today Will Be Bigger., TechCrunch
• Facebook Joins With McAfee to Clean Spam From Site, New York Times
• The Most Popular NBA Teams on Twitter and Facebook, AdamSherk.com

Web Analytics

• How To Get Past Last-Touch Attribution With Google Analytics, SEOmoz