SearchCap: The Day In Search, January 26, 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:

• Upstart DuckDuckGo Challenges Google With Strong Privacy, Cool Tools & Quackpot Name

  Here at Search Engine Land we regularly hear from people who have created “radical,” innovative,” “next generation” search technology, promising to “fix” the “broken” search we all allegedly pitifully struggle with today. In virtually every instance that I can remember, these promises over-hype and under-deliver, rarely offering something that becomes part of my regular search […]
• Search Marketing Tips For Yandex, Russia’s Top Search Engine

  Globally, Russia is the eighth largest market of Internet users, and as we know, Google is playing second fiddle to Yandex, which is currently the main search engine in Russia with well over half of the market share. Yandex makes hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and provides a broad range of online services […]

• LinkedIn Finally Officially Unveils Self-Service PPC Ads

  After more than two years of beta testing, LinkedIn’s self-service PPC ad offering, now called LinkedIn Ads, officially launched today. The service, launched in beta in July 2008 under the name LinkedIn DirectAds, originally offered targeting by geography, job function, industry, company size, seniority, age and gender. Now, with the official wide release, advertisers will also […]

• Google Will Drop Real Estate Search & Listings From Maps

  Google has just made a surprising announcement: Google Maps will drop its real estate listings search option on February 10th. Real estate was one of the options available inside Google Maps since July 2009, when it added a similar search form like the ones available on many real estate-specific websites. Google’s real estate search wasn’t […]

• Reports The Self-Service Twitter Ad Platform Is Live May Be Greatly Exaggerated

  That self-serve advertising platform that MediaPost got a look at? Well, Twitter is denying that it’s the self-service platform it plans to roll out this year for long-tail advertisers, according to a report in ReadWrite Web. “Reports that Twitter is testing a self-serve ad platform are inaccurate,” the company’s PR folks tweeted this afternoon. “We […]

• Google Leases 100,000 Square Feet In Historic Venice Beach Buildings

  Google is leasing 100,00 square feet in an architecturally significant complex of buildings (by Frank Gehry) in Venice California. Venice is near Santa Monica and home of the famed beach boardwalk, body builders, patchouli oil-wearing street vendors and a quasi-bohemian scene left over from the glory days of the 1970s. According to the LA Times: […]

• Report: Click Fraud Rate Drops to 19.1% In Q4 2010

  Click Forensics quarterly report on overall click fraud was released for the fourth quarter of 2010. They said the click fraud rate dropped from 22.3 percent in the previous quarter to 19.1% in the fourth quarter of 2010. This is the first decline in click fraude reported by Click Forensics since Q2 2009. As you […]

• Google Expansion Plans For Southeast Asia

  Google Targets Southeast Asia from the Wall Street Journal reports Google has plans to expand their operations in Southeast Asia. Google will be opening up a new office in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, which will be their first new office in the Asia region in four years. Google’s president, Japan and Asia-Pacific operations, Daniel Alegre said: […]

• A Post-Click Marketing Heuristic

  Post-click marketing is a big umbrella. There are many concepts under it, intricately interrelated to each other. It can be challenging to picture the entire ecosystem. But let’s give it a try! Here is a proposed “post-click marketing heuristic” that offers a guided tour through the creation and optimization of post-click experiences. (Click the image […]

• US Twitter Users Spending More Time Than Ever On Twitter.com, Report Says

  A new report from Experian Simmons says US-based Twitter users are spending more time on the Twitter.com website than ever before. But the report also cautions that overall visits to Twitter are down. Experian says the number of US adults that visited Twitter.com at least once a month fell 14% between November 2009 and November […]

• December 2010: Search Engine Land’s Most Popular Stories

  Below are Search Engine Land’s 10 most popular stories from December 2010: 1) Where Is Santa Claus? The 2010 Santa Tracker List, From NORAD To Google Earth 2) 10 Alternatives To Delicious.com Bookmarking 3) NORAD Santa Claus Tracker 2010 Now Open! 4) First Day Review: The Google Chrome OS Cr-48 Notebook 5) What Social Signals […]

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• Google Voice Number Porting: Pros and Cons, PC World

Business Issues

• Google expansion: Google leases office complex in Venice, Los Angeles Times
• Remember Googlezon?, John Battelle’s Searchblog

Local, Maps & Mobile

• Using Google Places for Offline Marketing, Epiphany

Link Building

• Google On Comment Spamming For Links, Search Engine Roundtable
• Secrets of Link Building, cornwallseo.com
• Training Link Builders, Search Engine Roundtable

Paid Search & Contextual

• Google Keyword Tool Blocking Gambling Related Suggestions?, Search Engine Roundtable
• New Interface Wednesdays: Graphs right in your account, Inside AdSense

Searching

• Explore Yad Vashem’s Holocaust archives online, Official Google Blog
• Holocaust historical data goes digital, The Associated Press
• Lines and Levels: Discover Atomic Spectra Data in Wolfram|Alpha, Wolfram|Alpha Blog
• Why a Search Engine Might Cluster Concepts to Improve Search Results, SEO By The Sea

SEM Industry

• Demand Media’s Stock Jumps 37 Percent On First Day, paidContent.org
• SEO Royale: conference party in Amsterdam, Yoast

SEO & SEM

• 4 Reasons Why SEO is Underfunded, Search Engine Watch
• Essential SEO & SEM Tips for 2011 – A Comprehensive Collection, dailyseotip.com
• Five common moans between SEO agencies and their clients, econsultancy.com
• How can I improve my linking on a Q&A site?, YouTube
• How to Get Things Done, SEO Style, Search Engine People
• SEO Is a Writer’s Profession Now, Search Engine Journal
• So Much Great New Stuff (On-Page Tool, More Accurate Rankings and a Linkscape Update!), SEOmoz
• Using Webmaster Tools like an SEO, Official Google Webmaster Central Blog

Social Media

• A Continued Commitment to Security, Facebook
• After Blocking Twitter, Egypt Reportedly Starts Restricting Access To Facebook, TechCrunch
• Facebook Experimenting With Voice Calling, Read/Write Web
• Twitter Launches New “Connections” Feature, thenextweb.com

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

• DOTW: What Makes a Great Client? – We've probably all had good clients and bad ones, clients we love working with and others that we didn't. Let's talk about the good ones. In this week's "Discussion of the Week," share the trait or traits that make a client great to work with.
• Is Google Offers a Threat to Groupon? Um, yeah! – Andrew Goodman  analyzes the information leaked from the Googleplex so far, concluding:  "GroupOn and the other first movers will face severe pressure on the arrogant revenue shares they’ve demanded from businesses in return for access to their deal-happy customer lists. Google, and others, will undercut them. (This is one of Google’s primary segment-entry tactics. It kept AdSense ad revenue shares high for publishers, which made it hard for similar display ad networks to woo publishers; it undercut Paypal rates with Google Checkout.) This makes GroupOn’s business — and the whole deals sector — less profitable in a hurry."
• How to recognize Twitter bots: 6 signals to look out for – Bas van den Beld lists six easy to spot patterns of typical bot behavior.
• Using Page Level Google Analytics Custom Variables to report on SEO traffic by page type – Patrick Altoft offers up a great little tip on how to dig deeper into your Google Analytics SEO data.
• SEO, the Semantic Web and Information Discovery – Aaron Bradley's excellent article explains Tim Berners-Lee's definition “a web of data that can be processed directly and indirectly by machines” for SEOs.
• 30 Ways to Use Social Media for Business People – This article has some great information for businesses new to the social media game. The list can help any business get started.
• 5 Things Businesses Should Know About SEO Agencies – Bruce Clay, Inc.'s SEO manager, Nasim Jafarzadeh, discusses the reasons why businesses may want to consider partnering with an SEO agency, even if they already have experienced in-house Internet marketers.
• How to Build an Effective Footer – Footers are one of the most often underused, misused and abused areas of a website. In this post, I’ll be taking a look at footers and passing on some tips to help you get more out of them.
• PPC as an SEO Research Tool – Ways to use PPC to better your SEO efforts and focus on the profit potential of keywords, not simply the traffic potential.
• How To Attract 55 Million Eyes In Just 4 Hours – Amidst all the current discussions of content farms, spinning content, outsourcing site content creation, etc. I was pleased to come across this post from Lisa Barone demonstrating that the old school method still works – "Create stuff people like. Lots of it." And to "…get off your butt to actually create it."
• Yandex Keeps On Beating Google In Russia – Yandex is a relatively small business compared to Google and yet they seem to be hanging onto — and even strengthening — their top spot in Russia.  What are they doing to achieve this and what could other search engines learn from their efforts — and success?
• Please Track Me and Personalize My Ads – Louis Gray looks into Web browser "Do Not Track" plug-ins and concludes that those in general will produce a worse surfing experience, with surfers suffering from more blatant irrelevant, obtrusive, and interruptive ads. His plea: "So instead of embracing these ad blockers and cookie strippers, let's find a way to make the quality of the ads more personal, more relevant, and simply better overall. Please."
• Optimizing Your Long-Tail Content Strategy Even In Overcrowded Niches – This guide by Ross Hudgens is "about the long tail. The sweet, syrupy long tail. Not your Daddy’s long tail – your extended family’s long tail." It tells you how to produce copy that actually ranks for long tail searches in competitive niches, in layman's terms.
• How To Build Agile SEO Tools Using Google Spreadsheets – Some great Google spreadsheet tips from Tom Critchlow that will be able to assist you in various SEO tasks.