SearchCap: The Day In Search, June 30, 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:

• OPA Study Reaffirms Display Ads Drive Search
  

  Search and display. One often hears how they work together, but there’s still plenty of skepticism out there, especially in the SEM community, about the value of display advertising. Indeed, during the recession search has prospered (relatively speaking) while display has suffered. But a new study from the Online Publishers Association (OPA) and comScore argues [...]

• Stephen Colbert Does Send-Up Of Twitter & Jeff Goldblum Death Rumor
  

  Last week, we covered how a rumor that Jeff Goldblum was dead spread on Twitter and even Google . This week, Stephen Colbert did a great send-up of the rumor, including a visit by Goldblum himself. The clip starts out with Colbert saying: “I was on the Twitter this weekend, and I saw a tweetening of the [...]

• Are You Link Building Or Just Keeping Up With The Joneses?
  

  If there’s one link development tactic that has been used to death, it has to be “see who’s linking to your competition and get them to link to you”. There are tools galore to help you do this, software you buy and install on your desktop, or web based apps. It’s a fairly simple technique [...]

• Google Releases AdWords API v2009 (Beta)
  

  The Google AdWords API Blog announced the new AdWords API v2009. The new API promises “more speed, scale, and flexibility to developers, at a lower cost.” The AdWords API v2009 will ultimately replace version 13, and there are “significant” differences between the two. The biggest additions include:

  Partial failure acceptance – We plan [...]

• YouTube To Launch “Call-To-Action Overlay” Ads
  

  TechCrunch reports that YouTube is adding a new ad type to its ad mix named “Call-To-Action Overlay” ads. These ads are very simple, they basically allow you to add a link to a third-party site, off of YouTube. The ad is a transparent background with an ad description and link to any site [...]

• The Toolbar Factor: Engagement’s Role in Social Voting
  

  Since their infancy, social news sites have been trying to stay one step ahead of social media users trying to artificially promote content to their front page. Digg.com has been the center focus for spamming and gaming in social media because a front-page promoted story equates to thousands of visitors and hundreds, or even thousands [...]

• Yahoo News Was Top Destination For Michael Jackson News
  

  Yahoo News was the web’s number one choice last week for information about the death of entertainer Michael Jackson. In a post on the Hitwise blog, Heather Dougherty shows a chart detailing how the major online News & Media sites fared:

  Late last week I wrote about how each of the major search engines handled the [...]

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• Bit.ly’s Grand Plans, And Their Inevitable Clash With Digg: Bitly Now, TechCrunch
• Updates to Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook, Official Google Enterprise Blog

Business Issues

• Ask.com Credits Nascar For Uptick In Search Share, paidContent.org
• SharesPost Report: Facebook Worth $4-6 Billion. So Much For That $10B Valuation, TechCrunch
• 60% Of Our Readers Like The Bing Commercials, Search Engine Roundtable
• Bing: The Art of Buying Share, Rimm Kaufman
• Local.com Takes $10M Line of Credit, Screenwerk
• Penny Baldwin Appointed to Senior Vice President of Global Integrated Marketing and Brand Management at Yahoo!, Yahoo Press Releases
• The MySpace Exodus Continues: SVP Engineering Allen Hurff Jumps Ship, TechCrunch
• Two More Mega Data Centers Online In July, LiveSide
• Yahoo Kills Maven: From Acquisition To Deadpool In 17 Months (Updated), TechCrunch
• YouTube Co-Founder Steve Chen Moves On, but Stays With Google, AllThingsD

Local, Maps & Mobile

• How To Claim Your Google Maps Listing, Search Engine Guide

Link Building

• Brand Name Links, I’ll Take Them, Search Engine Roundtable
• Links, Links and More Links, Search Cowboys

Paid Search & Contextual

• New Formats Give Online Video Ads Potential, Ad Age
• Quality Score fact of the week, AdWords Agency Blog
• AdWords click measurements accredited by MRC, Inside AdWords
• Google AdSense Firefox "Security Error", Search Engine Roundtable
• Setting YouTube Movies to Enable Revenue Sharing, Barry Schwartz

Searching

• A Changed Google Results Layout, Perhaps Experimental, Google Blogoscoped
• Cool Search Engines That Are Not Google, Wired
• Sparkly New Hot Searches Site, AOL Search Blog

SEM Industry

• How to Effectively Train an Internet Marketing Staff, Search Engine Journal
• The Perfect AdSense Professional Title, Search Engine Roundtable

SEO & SEM

• Can You Get a Website Indexed with No Links and XML Sitemaps?, Michael Gray
• How to Track Your Reputation or a Keyword in Multiple Resources via One Unifed Feed, Search Engine Journal
• The Triviality of On-Page HTML Tag Optimization, Google Cache
• When will the data in Webmaster Tools be improved?, YouTube

Social Media

• How the Mafia conquered social networks, News.com
• 16 bitchin’ commands and shortcuts for Twitter, Econsultancy
• Rackspace Doubles Twitter Followers With 45 Minute Outage, Barry Schwartz
• Social Media Profiles for Online Reputation Management, Search Engine Journal
• StumbleUpon Tip: Use Google to Choose the Best Category and Tags, Search Engine Journal

Video, Music & Image Search

• 5 Lesser Known Video Search Engines, Search Engine Journal
• Video Captioning and YouTube, John Andrews

Web Analytics

• Back to Basics: Free Google Analytics Tools, Google Analytics Blog
• Using Google Analytics to determine your Demographic Bidding strategy, Conversion Room

Other Items

• Celebrating Gay Pride 2009, Official Google Blog
• Courting creativity in Cannes, Yodel Anecdotal

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

• The Clash of Web and Traditional Advertising
• 3 Cool Greasemonkey Scripts That Improve Microsoft Bing
• Eric Lander Interviewed on Search, Twitter, Google, and More
• Links, Links and More Links
• Don't Mind Me, I Was Just Bored