SearchCap: The Day In Search, January 17, 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:

• A Personal Preview Of SMX West – And Why You Should Go!

  Our annual Search Marketing Expo (SMX) West is less than two months away on March 8-10, and it’s shaping up to be an exceptional show. As always, you can expect the great content, keynotes, networking activities and meals for which SMX events are famous. With all of the rapid changes that have been occurring with […]
• Seznam.cz Disputes Google’s No. 1 Ranking In Czech Republic

  Czech search engine Seznam.cz disagrees with recent reports that Google has overtaken it as the number one search engine in the Czech Republic. In a blog post with an accompanying English-language translation, Seznam calls last week’s news reports “misleading” and says they were based on “a rather unobjective interpretation of Toplist statistics.” The news, which […]

• Hot At Sphinn: Email Marketing’s Death, Desert Island SEO/PPC Tools & More

  Two stories kept Sphinn users quite engaged last week and led to one of the busiest weeks for user comments that we’ve seen in a while. In our “Discussion of the Week,” we asked readers to choose their “desert island” SEO/PPC tool. Yep, just one. If you were stranded on a desert island and could […]

• Case Study: How Negative Keywords Can Pump Up Paid Search Performance

  Once campaigns reach a certain size, successful paid search marketing becomes less about generating traffic and more about identifying and driving the highest value visitors. At the same time, however, scale makes creative testing and ad group refinement difficult to implement across hundreds of thousands or even millions of keywords. In a high-volume world, actively […]

• Questioning Paid Search Benchmarks

  Wouldn’t it be great if you could measure the success of your paid search program by comparing your numbers against industry benchmarks? Every advertiser would love to know how their program stacks up against the competition in terms of: The breadth of keyword coverage The quality of the landing pages chosen The effectiveness of the […]

• 5 Keys To Reselling Search Engine Marketing To Small Businesses

  Through the years, Marchex has created, managed and optimized hundreds of thousands of small business search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns on behalf of our partners. These include some of the world’s largest small business aggregators, such as AT&T and Yellow Pages Group Canada. This is really hard work – we’ve made plenty of mistakes and […]

• Spanish Want Google To Police Libel On The Internet

  In yet another difficult European regulatory decision for Google the Spanish data protection authority has demanded that Google remove links to articles online (e.g., newspaper articles) that contain defamatory content. According to the UK-based Guardian: The technology giant has been ordered to remove almost 100 online articles from its search listings by Spain’s data protection […]

• Google’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Logo

  Today Google has a special logo on Google.com for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Today would be his 82nd birthday celebration. Technically, Martin Luther King, Jr. was born on January 15th, but the United States celebrates the first Monday after his birthday as a national holiday for his leadership during the African American civil rights […]

• Robbing Peter To Pay Paul: Report Says MSN Suffering For Focus On Bing

  AdWeek and the NY Post are reporting that Microsoft’s use of its popular portal MSN as a traffic driver for Bing is compromising some of MSN’s partner relationships, angering internal sales staff and even costing the company revenue. The Post reports that “During the past quarter the mix of MSN headlines on its front page […]

• Google Links To Competitors Next To YouTube Videos

  Google has begun showing links to different video sites and search engines in its search results. The links appear next to YouTube videos — but only on music-related searches. On a search for u2, for example, Google shows three videos from YouTube, but each video listing now includes additional links that might otherwise have only […]

• 89% Find Search Engines Do Good Job Finding Information, But “Noise” Is Issue

  Has Google’s relevancy gotten worse? A recent opinion poll suggests not, while at the same time confirming a concern that’s been rising in anecdotal accounts — there’s too much “noise” surrounding the “signal.” Rasmussen Reports surveyed 740 adult Americans on January 4-5 about a variety of search engine related issues. The key question that caught […]

• Yahoo’s Irving: “Hell Yes” Yahoo Is Committed To Flickr

  Yahoo Product Chief Blake Irving just tweeted a ringing endorsement of Flickr, the company’s photo sharing site/community. Q. Is Yahoo! committed to Flickr? A. Hell yes we are! We love this product and team; on strategy and profitable. The tweet is no doubt a response to questions earlier this week about Flickr’s profitability and the […]

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• Questioning Quora, AuthorityLabs Blog

Business Issues

• Foursquare Just Poached Another Product Manager From Google, businessinsider.com
• Facebook Shares Hit $28.26 Per Share, That’s a $70 Billion Valuation, TechCrunch
• Goldman to Offer Facebook Shares Only to Non-U.S. Clients, Wall Street Journal
• Maria Bartiromo interviews Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, USATODAY.com
• Move partners with AOL, what is next for real estate search?, Agent Genius
• Top 10 Tech Investing Trends For 2011, 500 Startups
• Video – BoomTown Talks to Google’s Shan Sinha, Wall Street Journal

Local, Maps & Mobile

• Google Maps Won’t Let Owners Reply To Negative Reviews, Search Engine Roundtable
• Loci 2010 – Matt McGee, Mike Blumenthal

Link Building

• How Best to Use Links for SEO?, seo-theory.com
• 3 Techniques To Get Any Link You Want, Daily SEO Tip
• Guide to Competitive Backlink Analysis, SEOmoz
• SEO Tip: Recovering Backlinks When Changing Domains, Get Elastic Ecommerce Blog

Paid Search & Contextual

• A year of the new DoubleClick Ad Exchange: improving large publishers’ returns, Official Google Blog
• Google AdWords Testing Segmenting Related To Ads, Search Engine Roundtable
• Google My Client Center Tool Rules Of Use Update, searchmarketingcommunications.com

SEM Industry

• Mikko Ollila Moves on from Bing Local, Mihmorandum
• A Wide Smile in Search – Funny SEO Moments, Search Engine Journal
• What Industry Experts Look for On Twitter – Bruce Clay, Lee Odden, Rand Fishkin, Jordan Kasteler, Joe Hall, SEO Aware

SEO & SEM

• 3 ways to learn the SEO copywriting ropes, SEO Copywriting
• Google Adwords Tactics for Startups, ppcblog.com
• How Search, Social & Integrated Marketing Affect Job Searching, LiBeck
• SEO Mistakes That Just Make You Look Dumb, outspokenmedia.com

Social Media

• Facebook Grants Developers Access To Home Addresses … Trouble Waiting To Happen?, All Facebook
• 10 Ways To Increase Your Followers On Twitter, White Hat Media blog
• Anatomy of a Twitter Death Hoax: “Rip Nelson Mandela”, Dan Zarrella
• Facebook Doesn’t Help Me Find Anything, Search Engine Guide
• Q&A: Twitter co-founder and former-CEO Evan Williams, www.denverpost.com

Other Items

• Mark Zuckerberg Named One Of 2010’s Worst Dressed Celebrities (PHOTOS), huffingtonpost.com

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

• Stop Writing for People, Start Writing for Search Engines – While the title of this one is a bit misleading, this is really a good post about writing for both search engines and people!
• Guide to Competitive Backlink Analysis – Justin Briggs wrote an awesome post examining how he uses various tools to get a competitive link analysis. It's a must read for SEOs and linkbuilders.
• Google to fight Spanish demands to remove 'libelous' links – Google will this week challenge a Spanish demand to remove links to articles in newspapers, including El País, and official gazettes, in which the subjects of those articles have complained they are potentially defamatory.
• Google Testing Segmenting PPC Markets: Session Based Broad Match – Google has begun testing a new PPC layout for certain search queries. The new layout segments a broad keyword into segmented categories. This is also referred to as session based broad match.
• The Rodney Dangerfield School of Optimism – An interesting article on how to imagine the failure of your new product or service *before* it happens, in an attempt to avoid it happening for real.
• German Govt. Says Google Analytics Now Verboten – Matt McGee reports that German "privacy nazis" (aka data protection commissioners) are concerned that Google Analytics tracks web users’ IP addresses. They claim that could violate an individual’s privacy, despite the fact that users can opt out, and that the majority of German surfers don't use static IP addresses. A funny side note from the comments: the most annoying data protection commissioner of Hamburg operates a website making use of Web analytics that don't comply to his own privacy requirements.
• Does The Country Tweets Come From Impact How A Page Will Rank – Will a lot of tweets about your page from the UK get you ranking on Google UK but not Google US? This story suggests so.