SearchCap: The Day In Search, October 10, 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:

• Bing Rolls Out Another New Deals Product

  Bing has put considerable effort in the past several months into building out its deals content. First Bing introduced third party deals via its mobile website. It then created a retail-centric deals portal within Bing Shopping. More recently Microsoft added self-service group buying deals to the Bing Business Portal. And now there’s a new product […]
• After Little Resistance in Germany, Bing Expands Streetside Photos Across Europe

  Microsoft’s Streetside photo service will be taking photos across Europe before the end of the year. The expansion comes on the heels of its launch in Germany earlier this year — a move that’s generated far less resistance than Google’s Street View service. According to German news reports today, Bing’s Streetside service has received about […]

• Google’s Blog Strategist and Manager, Karen Wickre, Departs After Nine Years

  In an announcement fittingly posted on her own blog, Karen Wickre, Google’s senior manager of global communications & public affairs, says she has left the company. Wickre launched and masterminded the company’s blog strategy during her nine-year tenure at the company. Her farewell was something of a love letter to Google and the experiences she’s had […]

• Hot At Sphinn: Do Directory Links Still Matter, Facebook User Expectations & More

  Are links from the Yahoo Directory, DMOZ, Best of the Wen and other directories still valuable for SEO purposes? Or has the rise of social media and other channels made directory links less relevant? That was the topic of the “Discussion of the Week” on our sister site, Sphinn, last week. We asked, Are Directories […]

• Former Google Search Reps Start Search Quality Alliance

  A new site just launched under the name Search Quality Alliance, which is currently made up of five companies that offer SEO and web services. The big punch line here is that these five companies are all founded by former Google Search Quality representatives. As it states on the website: Search Quality Alliance is a […]

• How To Save Money On AdWords Placements With Google Analytics

  Google’s display network can bring you tremendous amounts of clicks and conversions if used correctly. If it is not used correctly, you can quickly spend mass amounts of money and have nothing to show for it. A couple of years ago, I wrote an article on how to manage the display network so you can […]

• 12 Tips For Using Press Releases In Local Online Marketing

  Press releases have long been a preferred (and now a patented) part of optimizing sites; when done well, they can be a good method for link building on steroids. Larger corporations often use the medium effectively, while it doesn’t occur to many local businesses. Here’s why you should consider it for promoting your local company online. […]

• Five-Step Strategy For Solving SEO Pagination Problems

  Pagination has always been a sticky problem for search engines. While not nearly as complex as faceted navigations for SEO, they can certainly cause crawling inefficiencies and excessive duplicate content. They can also create problems with undesirable pages ranking for important terms, in cases where the search engines don’t pick your preferred URL. Fundamentally, pagination […]

• New Google+ Setting: Control Your Inbound Notifications

  Google has just announced a new Google+ setting that I’m sure will be a big hit: the ability to control who can send you notifications. As Google’s Kathleen Ko explains in a Google+ post, this is feature that many users have requested. Ko says that the new setting won’t prevent you from getting notifications when […]

• Demand Media: “We Will Have Fewer eHow.com Assignments For The Foreseeable Future”

  Demand Media, the owner of many websites that have often been tagged with the “content farm” label, is planning to slow down its article production at eHow.com, its flagship website with three million articles. Business Insider has published an email sent from Demand Media to its stable of freelance authors. The email explains that, because […]

Search News From Around The Web:

Business Issues

• Google’s Troubled Search for Valuable Patents , Technology Review
• Google Must Be Feeling Burned For Investing In Intellectual Ventures, Business Insider
• Yang eyes Yahoo buyout with private equity, Reuters
• Alibaba seeks Temasek backing to buy stake from Yahoo: report, Reuters
• SocialGrapple Joins Google, dainbinder.com
• Yahoo supposedly out of Hulu bidding, Google still in, Electronista

Local, Maps & Mobile

• Google Places Spam Filter: Still Not Perfect, www.davidmihm.com
• Bing Windows Phone 7.5: Bing(o) on Mango, Bing Search Blog
• Daily Deal frenzy jolts local online ad market, Reuters
• Google Maps Embed Bug With Internet Explorer 7, Search Engine Roundtable
• Google Places Quality Guidelines Update -Ongoing Classes at a Different Location are Ineligible, Mike Blumenthal
• iPhone 4S Pre-Orders Top One Million in First 24 Hours, Apple
• Related Places Moving to Main Search Results?, Mike Blumenthal
• Smartphones and Tablets Drive Nearly 7 Percent of Total U.S. Digital Traffic, comScore

Link Building

• Google Webmaster Tools Links Skyrocket For Some, Search Engine Roundtable
• How I Found 400 Qualified Link Prospects In Eight Minutes, SEO.com

Paid Search & Contextual

• A fresh face for link units, Inside AdSense

Searching

• Calling all Google Political Trend Spotters, Google Politics & Elections Blog
• Top Searched Halloween Costumes on Yahoo!, Yahoo

SEM Industry

• Bing Webmaster Customer Service Is Great, Search Engine Roundtable
• Five Questions with Jon Henshaw from Raven Tools, Search Engine Journal

SEO & SEM

• AdWords API v201109 launch — providing better targeting and reporting, AdWords API Blog
• 20% of Searches on Google are new… another SEO Myth?, John Andrews
• SEO Pricing Models: How Much Should You Charge?, Search Engine Watch
• 10 Steps to a Successful SEO Migration Strategy, Search Engine Watch
• 5 Content Management CMS Tips for Large Enterprises, SEOmoz
• 5 Key Metrics to Measure Success of Paid Search Campaigns, blog.hubspot.com
• 5 Page Quality Indicators That Can Outweigh PageRank, Search Engine People
• 5 Things To Do Now Before Your SEO Falls Apart, Search Engine People
• Data Scraping guide for SEO, SEO himanshu
• Paid Search Metrics – How not to measure your campaigns, SageRock
• What is a Reverse Proxy and How Can it Help My SEO?, SEOmoz

Social Media

• Bringing Social App Discovery to Mobile, Facebook Developers
• Facebook Acquires Social Q&A Service Friend.ly — Team To Work On New Things, But Service Will Stay Open, TechCrunch
• Judge Refuses To Dismiss Twitter From Patent Lawsuit Concerning Patent On Interacting With Famous People Online, TechDirt

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

• Google & Bing Disagree On Rel=Canonical Implementation – Google & Bing disagree on how best to implement the rel=canonical tag, despite the canonical tag being a "joint effort" supported by both engines to reduce duplicate content. Matt Cutts chimes in to explicitly disagree with Bing's Duanne Forrester on the proper implementation of the tag.
• 98% of online US adults aged 18-24 use social media – 98% is one eye-opening statistic for any reader, but that’s how many adults aged eighteen to twenty-four in the United States are reportedly using social media in a typical month.
• Five-Step Strategy For Solving SEO Pagination Problems – An extremely actionable post that can be quite useful for folks managing product-driven sites.
• Can Yelp Help Independent Restaurants Drive Chains Out of Business? – "A one-star increase in Yelp rating leads to a 5-9 percent increase in revenue."  That’s a big deal right there. When consumers have information that they trust (especially from multiple users or particularly detailed reviews) it influences decisions.
• Best Social Media Metrics: Conversation, Amplification, Applause, Economic Value – A way to definte the value of social media participation.
• Are You Teaching Your Customers? Pssst … Your Competitors Are – Good post on how powerful educating and providing customers with value through knowledge can be.
• Start Collecting Your Cookies! Setting up Remarketing Tags 101 – Nice post about how to use Remarketing to set up new ways to better attract users who've previously expressed interest in your brand.
• What Do Facebook Users Expect from Brands – Facebook users themselves have some preconceived notions about what to expect when they “like” a company on the site, and among those who do not become brand fans, many are negative. More than half of users expect to be bombarded with messages or ads (54%), while 45% do not want to give companies access to profile information and 31% do not want to push content from a company into friends’ newsfeeds. These possibilities have prevented users from making brand connections on the social networking giant.
• AdWords Remarketing: A Step-by-Step Guide – A really excellent overview of this important PPC topic.