SearchCap: The Day In Search, June 26, 2009

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

• AdWords Conversion Tracking: How To Optimize Your Account 10x Quicker
  

  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could get data 10 times faster so you could make your bid & ad decisions in days instead of weeks or months? If you are presently only tracking sales conversions in AdWords, there may be a better way.

• One Week Left To Pitch Sessions Ideas For SMX East
  

  Want to speak at our SMX East SEM conference, happening Oct. 5 to 7 in New York? The very best way is to pitch a great session idea, and you have through the end of next week to do it. Use our Session Pitch Form to send in your ideas. The form [...]

• Search In Pictures: King Albert II, Yahoo Girls & Pamela’s Pegman Piñata
  

  In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more. Yahoo Bike Girls: King Albert II Visits Google Data Center: Max Morgan performs @ Yahoo: Yahoo Police Women?: Happy Birthday Pamela [...]

• Focus Group Study Offers Good & Bad News For Bing
  

  TechCrunch yesterday reported on the results of a focus group conducted by NY design firm Catalyst Group comparing usability on Bing and Google. The study showed that in many instances Bing was preferred but that users already familiar and comfortable with Google would likely stay with Google. What’s partly interesting about this is that the [...]

• How To: Excel At Excel For SEM Applications, Part 3
  

  In this continuing series (part 1, part 2), I’ve shared some tips and tricks specifically for the search marketing professional using Microsoft Excel. The feedback has been great (thank you!), so I’m going to expand these posts to not just include tasks associated with SEM, but into a mini-Excel training course for search marketers [...]

• Jeff Goldblum Is NOT Dead (Despite What Google Says)
  

  I can’t believe I’m writing this post. But on a day when both Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson have died, people are clearly ready to believe anything. And a rumor that Jeff Goldblum has passed away is making the rounds, unable to be squashed because all the sites talking about it keep crashing under the [...]

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• Google Disables Gmail SMS Text Chat After it Goes Wonky, Google Watch
• My Yahoo adds Gas Buddy app, www.myyblog.com

Business Issues

• Celebrating 10 years of giving back, ycorpblog.com
• Get-Rich-Quick Ads Steal Google’s Brand Equity, Ad Age
• Baidu.com (BIDU) PriceWatch Alert Support Down To $273.26, Market Intelligence Center
• Google CEO says worst of crisis is over, Reuters
• The Counter Argument for Newspapers: Why newspapers should opt out of Google News or Force Rev Share Agreements, bg Theory, LLC

Local, Maps & Mobile

• Exploring Երևան and کراچی in Google Earth, Google LatLong
• Tips and Tricks: Set up shop in the Local Business Center, Google LatLong

Paid Search & Contextual

• Facebook Click Fraud 101, TechCrunch
• Google AdWords Session Based Broad Match?, SEOptimise
• Google Search Query Report, SageRock
• New Interface Thursday: Exploring campaign settings, Inside AdWords
• Search Marketers: Time To Move Marketing Budgets To Bing / adCenter, Search Engine Roundtable

Searching

• Bing Filters out Sensitive Results for Chinese Searches, PC World
• bing cashback 101, Bing Community
• I Miss Yahoo: Please Make a Come Back, Please, Search Engine Roundtable
• Searches Soar on the King of Pop – Yahoo! Buzz, The Buzz Log

SEM Industry

• Ruud Questions: Brian Carter, Search Engine People
• Second Round of SEM Scholarship Contest Entries Posted, Marketing Pilgrim

SEO & SEM

• 5 Ways to Improve your SEO Landing Pages, SEOmoz
• CSS Image Replacement, what’s up Matt?, Yoast
• Getting Google Crawl Without Indexing?, Search Engine Journal
• Google Mistakes Image for Video in My Post, Screenwerk
• Google Rich Snippets – a knol by Google Rich Snippets, Google
• New tools for webmasters in the bing toolbox, Bing Community
• SEM Training Strategy: Overcoming Common Mistakes, SEO Book
• SEO Checkup Tool Added To ShoeMoney Tools Suite, ShoeMoney
• Spam2.0: Fake user accounts and spam profiles, Official Google Webmaster Central Blog
• The 6 Spheres of Social Media Marketing, Search Engine People
• The Internal Battle For SERP Supremacy, Search Engine Journal
• Want Your Google News To Show Up in Google Finance? NASDAQ:GOOG, Search Engine Roundtable
• Whiteboard Friday – Correlation, Causation & SEO, SEOmoz
• Why are sites sometimes removed from the directory?, DMOZ Blog
• Why Google May Shorten Your Long URL in the SERPs, Search Engine Roundtable
• Will I be penalized if my URLs all have the same priority?, YouTube

Social Media

• Search results temporarily disabled from logged-in homepage, Twitter Status
• Twitter Employee Clusters, neoformix.com
• Monitoring Social Media Metrics, outspokenmedia.com

Video, Music & Image Search

• YouTube Now Allowing 20GB Uploads?, Barry Schwartz

Web Analytics

• "Data Driven Discussions" series premiere!, Google Analytics Blog

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

• How BING Can Impact Your Business’ Online Marketing Strategy
• The 12 Skills That Have Served Me Best in My SEO Career
• Google’s Matt Cutts On “Over Optimization”
• Twitter SEO – The Slow Death of Twitter Hash Tags
• Want a link on a throw-away domain?