SearchCap: The Day In Search, October 17, 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:

• Will Google See $6.25 Billion In Mobile Ad Revenue Next Year?

  During the earnings call last week after Google announced massive quarterly revenues ($9.72 billion), CEO Larry Page casually dropped the following remark about the company’s mobile business: “We’re also seeing a huge positive revenue impact from mobile, which has grown 2.5x in the last 12 months to a run rate of over $2.5 billion.” Claire […]
• Want to Write Better PPC Ads? Try Cat Food For Inspiration

  It was way past quitting time, and though I still was on deadline for a new flight of text and display ads, my creative muse had quit hours earlier and gone home or wherever it is that muses go when they desert you. The phone rang. It was my wife calling to ask me to […]

• Hot At Sphinn: SEO Frustrations, Importance Of Split Testing & More

  It was time to vent last week on our sister site, Sphinn. Though there were several active discussions going on, none generated the interest and participation as our question that invited members to share their SEO frustrations. And it wasn’t just about SEO, actually. Our “Discussion of the Week” asked, What Frustrates You Most as […]

• Infographic: Why Content For SEO?

  How does content help with SEO efforts? The folks at Brafton have produced a “Why Content For SEO” infographic with lots of stats and information about the topic that you might find interesting: Want the infographic for yourself? You’ll find it here: Infographic: Why Content for SEO?

• Bitly Launches Search Platform & Reputation Monitoring For Shortened Links

  Bitly currently is the leader in shortned URLs, minimizing 80 million URLs each day. Not only is Bitly shrinking URLs, but they are now “crawling & classifying” each shortened URL thanks to a a new social search platform. An index has since been created that will allow searchers to view the most distributed, viral and highest clicked links […]

• 5 Considerations In Planning Your Small Business 2012 Ad Budget

  Last month, I had the opportunity to join nearly 400 leaders from major local search companies for the BIA/Kelsey DMS ‘11 conference in Denver. The annual industry event, which this year included speakers and panelists from the likes of AT&T Interactive, Eniro, Facebook, Local Matters, Microsoft Advertising, Telmetrics, Urbanspoon, Yellow Pages Group and Yellowbook – […]

• Bing On Mobile Search & SEO

  If you read this column on a regular basis, you may think that Google is the only game in mobile search. The fact is, SEOs optimize for traffic, and Google is the mobile search market leader, so it is often the focus of our mobile optimization efforts. But it’s not the only game in town. […]

• Google Launches Online Safety Campaign With Citizens Advice Bureau

  Google teams up with Citizens Advice Bureau via The Telegraph reports Google is running their first non-Google specific campaign in the UK to promote awareness for online safety. The campaign is named “Good To Know” and leads to google.co.uk/goodtoknow where users can learn more about online safety tips. Google teamed up with the Citizens Advice […]

• 6 Things To Learn About Differentiation From The Auto Insurance Industry

  Successful SEO strategies demand differentiation. In today’s column, I am going to outline a seven-step process for figuring out how to differentiate your website. You may be struggling with how to do this because your product may be boring, and your space is crowded. So, I am going to start by taking a look at […]

• Private: Google Analytics Flow Visualization Gets a New Face

  Google Analytics announced a new set of reports that should help marketers and website owners to understand how users behave on their websites. This feature is an interesting solution to an old problem: analyzing paths throughout a website in a scalable way. Path analysis has historically been a feature that provided little insights on user […]

• Head To Head: Siri Vs. Google Voice Actions

  When you first begin using Siri it’s not entirely clear what you can do with it. (It’s also not clear how to access it.) Yesterday Danny wrote up some initial thoughts/criticisms of the Siri local search experience. In this piece I’m going to offer some general thoughts comparing Siri (on an iPhone 4S) with Google […]

• Why Siri + Yelp = Useless Google Maps On The iPhone 4S

  It sounds great. Speak into Siri about some local need, get nice results from Yelp’s reviews. In reality, it’s pretty easy instead to end up stuck with only a phone number and directions from Google Maps. From Siri To Yelp To Google Maps Consider this example, which illustrates the situation I’ve repeatedly found to be […]

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• Feedburner – HTTP 400 Error Code When Burning Google Apps Feed, Bainbridge

Business Issues

• Facebook spending on business equipment nearly triples, Mercury News
• Samsung won’t get preliminary injunction against iPhone 4S in Australia, situation less clear in Japan, FOSS Patents
• Study on the worldwide use of FRAND-committed patents, FOSS Patents

Local, Maps & Mobile

• How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Places Automatic Updates, Mike Blumenthal
• Merging Google Places Listings Just Got Easier, www.smallbusinessonlinecoach.com
• More Google Wallet merchants are live. Now you can pay AND save in a single tap., Official Google Blog
• Research in Motion Pins Hopes on Its Next OS, New York Times

Link Building

• Check My Links Chrome Extension – A Link Builder’s Dream, SEOmoz

Searching

• Think You’ve Disabled Google’s Web History Tracking? Check Again., TechCrunch

SEO & SEM

• Google Keyword Mutation: Google Changes Search Query Keywords on the Fly, SEO Book
• Social Signals & SEO: Focus on Authority, Search Engine Watch
• 5 SEO Keyword Research Mistakes You Probably Make, Search Engine People
• Google Webmaster Tools Home Page Not Working In Some Browsers, Search Engine Roundtable
• How does Google AdWords work? Infographic, Pulpmedia
• HTML5 and SEO: New Strategies for Optimizing Code, Vertical Measures
• Integrating SEO & PPC: 3 Areas to Explore, Search Engine Watch
• Mobile SEO is a Myth, Search Engine Journal
• PPC Landing Pages: You Got the Click, But Where Did You Send It?, Search Engine People
• Search Algorithms with Google Director of Research Peter Norvig, Stone Temple

Social Media

• David Cameron ‘will never shut down Facebook’, Telegraph
• Trackur Adds Google+ Monitoring, Marketing Pilgrim

Video, Music & Image Search

• Google Voice pulled from App Store following iOS 5 crash, Engadget
• Google Music Store Will Launch This Quarter, Business Insider
• New YouTube features for music artists, YouTube Blog

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

• Leveraging User Research for More Effective Feature Prioritization – Some of the best guidance to identify high priority features comes from the research you have about your users. Here's how you can use that insight to make the 'right' decisions.
• What SEOs Must Learn from Adwords Folks – An argument that SEO's should copy some of the PPC methodology & accountability.
• This Is Why You're Stupid, or How to Deal with Criticism on the Internet – Blogger Susannah Breslin writes, "I’ve been writing online professionally for over a decade and blogging since 2002. Once you start writing on the Web, you discover that a necessary skill for survival is developing a thick skin."
• 70 Percent of Companies Ignore Customer Complaints on Twitter – Despite increasing numbers of customers using Twitter to publicly complain about brands, the vast majority of companies respond in the exact same way….with the quiet of contempt.
• I think we need some time apart, it's not me, it's you – Really good data driven post about customer engagement in social media.