SearchCap: The Day In Search, March 20, 2008

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

From Search Engine Land:

• SES NY Day Four Coverage Recap
  Search Engine Strategies day four, the last day, is now officially over. The live bloggers should have put down their ‘pens’ by now, so I thought I share the final day’s live blogger sessions. Before doing so, I wanted to personally thank all the live bloggers from aimClear Blog, Alt…
• Search Biz: New York Privacy Law May Set National Precedent; AOL Worth Half Of Yahoo? & Surprise, Google Still #1
  A privacy law taking shape in the New York legislature will make it a crime for internet companies to use personal information about consumers for advertising without their consent. And because of the generally boundaryless nature of the internet, it would effectively set a national precedent for companies collecting…
• Branding Coming To Search In A Big Way
  Search has historically been seen as a direct response vehicle and the notion that search is a branding medium has traditionally been met with considerable skepticism by search marketers, albeit somewhat less recently. In an effort to be provocative in moderating the “branding and search” panel at SMX West last…
• Yahoo Graphical/Video Search Ads Named Partner Results
  Last night I heard a commercial for Honda, where it told the audience to go to Yahoo and search for “shop honda.” I, being an obedient TV viewer, did as instructed and searched for shop honda and saw this ad:…
• Add Videos To Your Google Local Business Profile
  Stephen Espinosa notes that you can now add videos to your Google Local Business Center profile. Before hand, to get a video to show up in your profile, you had to somewhat get lucky. Now, you can add them manually. This is a great way to add customer video testimonials,…
• Ten Strategies For Avoiding Search Marketing Burnout
  Search marketing is the ultimate seductress. It lures you in with the promise of an interesting, exciting career that can actually pay the bills, but soon you’re regularly pulling 12 hour days with no vacations. There’s intense pressure to achieve high search rankings and triple digit ROIs to keep…
• Being Off-Topic, Off-Message, Or Off-Brand Can Be Good For Your SEO!
  Ok, perhaps I’m being a bit provocative here, but sometimes it’s the off-topic, off-message, or off-brand content that earns you the most valuable links—links that you wouldn’t have otherwise gotten. Those links can really pay the bills, in terms of the extra search traffic and resulting sales. The brand…
• Can EveryZing Automate Video SEO?
  EveryZing (formerly named Podzinger) is a Boston based company that has announced a suite of products for video search, EveryZing’s ezSearch product lets media companies offer their users a single integrated search box for audio, video, images, and text. Once ezSearch has blended results into a unified database, the…

Search News From Around The Web:

Business Issues

• FCC: Verizon Wireless Has National License In C-Block, SmartMoney
• Smelling Trouble Behind AOL’s $850 Million Bebo Deal, TechCrunch
• The age of Google, The Sydney Morning Herald
• Tibet Missing on Google News China Homepage, Google Blogoscoped

Local, Maps & Mobile

• Hurricane flood threat coming soon to Google, Reuters
• Google Maps now native on more phones: Do UIQ? We do., Official Google Mobile Blog
• HTC names Google phone, ‘Dream’, Yahoo! News
• Mapping March Madness, Google LatLong

Link Building

• Link Building Part 1: Links As A Larger Online Marketing Strategy, Vanessa Fox
• 50 million links : Inside the Digital Point Coop, BlogStorm
• Google Should Add Inbound Link Opt Out Feature to Webmaster Tools, Search Engine Roundtable
• Link Building from the Heart: Giving to Get, Search Engine Watch
• Natural SEO : Reciprocal Linking and Interlinking, Search Engine Journal

Paid Search & Contextual

• Google AdWords To Limit Site Exclusion Feature To 5,000, Search Engine Roundtable
• Turning Display Ads into "Search", Screenwerk

SEM Industry

• IMNY Charity Party a Huge Success, Gray Wolf
• Miss The IM-NY SES NY Charity? How Can You Still Contribute, Barry Schwartz
• SES New York 2008: Rebecca Lieb WebProNews Videos, WebProNews
• SES New York: Jason Calacanis WebProNews Videos, WebProNews
• Stick ‘em up!, Inside AdSense

SEO & SEM

• Do I Really Need to Perform SEO for My Website?, SEOptimise
• Separating Web Spam from Quality Content – What are the Metrics?, SEOmoz

Social Media

• Can You Take a Vacation From Social Media?, Collective Thoughts
• How LinkedIn Got Its Groove Back, Mark Evans
• Marketers Struggle to Get a Firm Grip on Social Media, Ad Age
• MyBlogLog Launches Topical Meta Lifestreams , Read/Write Web
• Second Life Voted Last Year’s Most Over-Hyped Trend, Ad Age
• Social Networking: All You Need to Know About Personal Branding With Twitter, Marketmou
• Social Search: Welcome to the World of Socialommerce’, Search Engine Watch

Video, Music & Image Search

• Announcing Video Search – Search across 15,000 Video Sites, Mefeedia Blog
• Vetting would spoil YouTube: creator, The Sydney Morning Herald

Web Analytics

• 20 Resources For Google Analytics, Search Engine Guide

Other Items

• How To Evaluate a Internet Property Part 2 – Rate of Growth, ShoeMoney

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

• Happy Birthday Bill Slawski!
• Niche Marketing and Link Building Resources
• Can Fake Stories Go Popular on Sphinn?
• Productivity, How-to and Advice Sites: Making Linkbait Useful Again
• Context Is King Baby! Go Get Your Own.
• 6 Reasons Why Your Linkbait Failed
• 7 Social Media Websites and Their Impact on SEO
• 101 Five-Minute Fixes to Improve Your Web Site
• So Many Ways to Pursue Links and So Little Time
• 0 To 4,000 Visits A Day In Ten Weeks Using Blogging
• Come On BABY! SES NYC = Total SEM Immersion!