SearchCap: The Day In Search, November 6, 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:

• Change.gov Launches, But Can You Find It In Search Engines?
  If you’re looking for more about how the Change We Need will be implemented by incoming President Elect Barack Obama’s administration, good news! He’s got a new transition website up: Change.gov. Bad news — you’d be hard pressed to find it in search being both new and being untargeted toward any search terms. SEO 101: Know your audience. That means know how your audience is searching for you. What do people likely want from this new site? Chances are, the campaign itself hasn’t thought of this. That’s because the title tag of the home page says this:
• How To Get Discovered Through Video Search
  You may have heard the story about how the band Journey found a replacement for their lead singer on YouTube. Videos of Arnel Pineda performing Journey covers in the Philippines were uploaded to YouTube by Pineda’s friend in February of 2007. These videos caught the eye of Journey guitarist Neil Schon, who happened to be in the market for a new lead singer. Schon contacted the person who uploaded the videos and was able to obtain Pineda’s contact info. A few months later, Pineda was touring the world as Journey’s new front man. While Joe Six Pack may not be scouring YouTube for a new lead singer for his 80’s band, he’s still discovering new things through video search every day. Perhaps it’s a new album, TV show, pickup truck, or Blendtec blender. Savvy online marketers need to get in front of Joe with some online video showcasing their products. Here are a few tips to help your product get discovered through video search:
• Glync Adds Link Timeline To Google Webmaster Tools
  For all the great data that Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) offers, there are also some notable things missing. One that webmasters and search marketers have asked for is a way to track links over time. If you wanted a timeline of your inbound link counts from GWT, you had to chart them manually. Until now.
• Microsoft Integrates Photosynth Into Live Maps
  Channel 10 reports Microsoft has integrated Photosynth into Live Maps. Greg covered Photosynth when it first went public, he described it as a “totally cool” tool that allows Windows users to upload photos, “the technology automatically “synths” them, creating a 3-D, 360-degree interactive photo collage of whatever the photographs depict.” Microsoft has now integrated it with Live Maps and you can see live examples in Seattle, Vatican city, at the Leaning tower of Pisa and many more places. Greg Sterling posted additional screen captures at his personal blog. In other Microsoft mapping news, they …
• Yahoo Invites Another Bid From Microsoft
  Everyone at Yahoo must be totally exhausted — perhaps most of all CEO Jerry Yang. It’s probably apprpriate to now use modifiers such as “beleaguered” or “embattled” to describe Yang. Mike Arrington has called for Yang to be replaced, as have others before him. After the termination of the Google paid search deal yesterday, more people will likely be doing the same. Yahoo has many initiatives in various stages of execution and still has tremendous value to the consumer public (consumers don’t care who the CEO of Yahoo is). But if Yahoo were a parliamentary regime, there would be a vote of “no confidence” coming from much of the tech press and many bloggers.
• Communicating Search Success Using a Dashboard Report
  As companies in many industries start to more closely evaluate their marketing budgets, communicating the success and impact of search marketing within your company is as critical as ever. When presenting this information to your executive team or colleagues who may not be as familiar with search marketing, you want to be thorough but concise. For me, a dashboard is the best tool for this. My dashboard shows, at a high level, the performance of three search streams. I distribute (via e-mail and/or print) and present the dashboard monthly to executives, developers, and colleagues at levels in between. It is my most important and frequently used analysis, and I rarely attend a meeting without it. Here are some pointers on creating a great dashboard from the standpoint of an in-house marketer responsible for multiple traffic streams.
• B2B & Gen Y: An Opportunity Not 2B Missed!
  When you hear the term Generation Y, what do you think of? iPods? Instant messaging? Online communities? If so, you’re on track. But as a B2B marketer, you should add target market to that list. And if you don’t think this demographic is part of your audience, think again. The Opportunity Inherently tech savvy and mostly in their twenties, Generation Y (Gen Y) now represents a large part of today’s workforce. And that spells opportunity for B2B marketers. Yet how many of the business-to-business ilk are capitalizing on it? My guess is few. After all, half the battle of seizing an opportunity is first recognizing it exists, and in many ways, Gen Y is a B2B marketing opportunity hidden in plain sight.
• Looking For Speakers For SMX West
  Our next three day search marketing conference comes to Silicon Valley this coming Feb. 10-12: SMX West. I’m preparing the agenda later this month. As part of that, I’ve put out a call for session ideas. Pitching a great session idea is the very best way to get to speak at our popular shows. You’ve got until the end of next week to make a pitch, using our form here. FYI, after the final agenda is posted, we’ll also do a second call for speakers, this time for sessions that have actually been selected. I look forward …

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• Hitwise Ranks Election Traffic To News Sites, TechCrunch

Business Issues

• Larry Brilliant outlines Google’s giving strategies , ZDNet
• LinkedIn Cuts 10% Of Staff, TechCrunch
• MySpace Music CEO Debuting Tomorrow?, AllThingsD
• Read me first: Google’s copyright war will have open access advocates up in arms, The Guardian
• SEC’s Proposed Guidance on Hyperlinking Contravenes 47 USC 230, Eric Goldman

Local, Maps & Mobile

• Ballmer dismisses Google Android, News.com
• Googlephone Jailbreak: Remote Access Gained, Wired
• Pushpins and Virtual Earth Web Service Maps, Virtual Earth, An Evangelist’s Blog
• Yelp Adds More Tools for SMBs, Screenwerk

Link Building

• An SEO is Not a Link Builder, Link Building Best Practices
• How to Build Links and Awareness by Pitching Bloggers, Search Engine Journal
• Obama’s Link Strategy Fuels Election Victory, Search Engine Watch

Paid Search & Contextual

• adCenter Help Topics Updated with New Fall Upgrade Info, adCenter Blog for Advertisers
• adCenter Holiday Advertising Guide, adCenter Blog for Advertisers
• AdWords system maintenance on November 8th, Inside AdWords
• Google AdSense Finally Fixed Manage Ads Color Picker, Search Engine Roundtable
• Google Says You Should be Including Canada in All Your PPC Campaigns, What!?, PPC Hero
• Launched: Bloomberg Network Inventory Available through Google TV Ads, Google Traditional Media Blog
• The Account Quality Score: Money Pit for the Uninformed, Search Engine Watch

Searching

• Accessible View: An ARIA for web search, Official Google Blog
• A Delicious Anniversary, Yahoo Search Blog
• Buy now on eBay for 25% cashback, Live Search
• Discussing the Global Brain and the Future of the Web (Video), Google Blogoscoped
• Sizing Up the Long Tail of Search, Hitwise
• Time to book for the holidays as airfares drop, Live Search
• Wikipedia Categories Visualizer, Google Blogoscoped

SEM Industry

• Google’s AdWords Forum Moves: We Are Tracking Them, Search Engine Roundtable
• PubCon 2008: We’ll Be There, and Here’s Our Schedule, Search Engine Roundtable
• What If SEO Was Spelled TSA?, BruceClay.com

SEO & SEM

• 5 Common Ad Testing Mistakes, SEOptimise
• After a Google Penalty, How Long Does It Take To Get Rankings Back?, Search Engine Roundtable
• Content Management Evolution: 14 Tips to Avoid the Wrong System, AIM Clear Blog
• Google Webmaster Tools "Link From" Report Bug, Search Engine Roundtable
• Google’s Matt Cutts Looks to Stifle Virtual Blight, eWeek
• How to Find the Spam You’re Linking To, SEOmoz
• Lazy Publishers Rejoice: Get Your Content From Pluck On Demand, TechCrunch
• Lots of Marketing Goodies, SEO Book
• SEO-sans Greetings – Taking advantage of Xmas through Search Engine Marketing, Site Visibility
• When SEO Clients Won’t Follow Advice?, SEMpdx Blog

Social Media

• Customer Service and Reputation Management the Twitter Way: A Case Study, SEOmoz
• How to Get Media Coverage for Your Blog, ProBlogger
• How to Multi-Microblog : 2 Tools to Help You Spread Your Word, Search Engine Journal
• MySpace MyAds Product A $50 Million Business A Month After Launch, TechCrunch
• StumbleUpon Takes A Lesson From Digg, Starts Banning Users, Read/Write Web
• US Navy issues one of the first social media guidelines in the government sector, Web Ink Now

Video, Music & Image Search

• New Features for the YouTube Embeddable Video, YouTube Blog
• Video Search Engine Mefeedia Relaunches, Read/Write Web

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

• ONE Quick & Dirty Twitter ORM Tip
• Kevin & the Googlebots [cartoon]
• Michael Gray Launches New Website ViralConversations.com
• How to Dominate Facebook with Twitter
• Three Reasons Your "Quality" SEO Blog is Worth to Me
• glync: Google Webmaster Tools External Link Tracker
• Ultimate SMM (Social Media Marketing) Guide
• Google Slowly Dropping PageRank From The Toolbar?
• Barack Obama The First Social Media President?
• 10 Reasons Why Your Website Looks Like Spam
• Welcome to the IMBroadcast.com Blog
• The Beginner’s Guide to Twitter
• How to Build Up and Participate in Social Network Communities
• Google Search Update Blows Up, Google Reverting Back Now