SearchCap: The Day In Search, October 26, 2010

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

From Search Engine Land:

• Canada’s Yellow Pages Group Acquires Enquiro

  Canada’s Yellow Pages Group has acquired the well-known search marketing agency Enquiro and folded it into a new entity known as Mediative.
  As explained in today’s announcement, Mediative will provide digital marketing services for national agencies and advertisers in Canada. YPG has also acquired two other Canadian advertising/marketing companies, Ad Splash Media and UPTREND Media.
  Enquiro […]
• Blekko Getting Ready To “Slash The Web”

  Perhaps appropriately Blekko will launch late Halloween/early Monday morning. Somewhat amazingly Blekko emerges as a credible alternative to the major search engines. With its power-user tools and transparency it will delight some people and no doubt mystify others.
  It offers a novel and pretty useful take on “social search.” In the beginning it won’t (and can’t) […]

• Life With Google TV: Watching, But Not Finding, Free Caprica Episodes On The Web

  My Life With Google TV series continues. Yesterday’s test: how well could Google TV locate free (and legitimate) episodes of Caprica on the web? Answer: not very well. But once I found them the old fashioned way, Google TV did make it pretty easy to watch them on the “big” screen of my TV, versus […]

• Business Photos Help Build Google Places/Maps Brand Identity

  Google’s effort to bring photographers to local businesses to capture interior and exterior images now bearing fruit. The company announced that the images that its contractors have been collecting (all over the world) are now online:
  Starting today, the images we’ve taken as part of the pilot can be viewed on the Place pages of participating […]

• Is Unsocial The Future Of Social Search?

  Earlier this month Microsoft and Facebook announced a new partnership that essentially makes Bing a social search engine. Danny Sullivan has written a great overview, but basically if you’re logged into Facebook and use Bing, you’ll now see results which are based on content viewed and shared by your Facebook friends: in this way, “Likes” […]

• How To Clean Up Your Link Profile

  When a potential client comes to us for a proposal, the first thing that we do is to analyze the existing backlink profile. We used to put an insane amount of time into this exercise, but when that time is weighed against other tasks for existing clients, we decided that it needed to be made […]

• Google’s Susan Wojcicki Promoted To Senior Vice President

  Susan Wojcicki, the woman who rented her garage to Google’s co-founders in the early days of Google’s existence, has been promoted. Wojcicki was the Vice President, Product Management of Google’s advertising and measurement platform products, including AdWords, AdSense, DoubleClick and Google Analytics. She is now one of eight Senior Vice Presidents at Google.
  I […]

• Class Action Suit Targets Google, Seeks Elmination Of Search “Referrer” Leakage

  On the heels of a formal privacy complaint by former FTC employee Chris Soghoian targeting Google’s embedding of search queries in page URLs, a new class action lawsuit takes aim at the same thing. It seeks monetary damages and an injunction against Google’s alleged sharing of searches with third parties.
  Google Said To Share User Queries
  Filed […]

• Google Instant Search Has Already Made Millions: Report

  A new study suggests that Google Instant Search has already had a positive impact on search advertising, benefiting advertisers through higher impressions and clicks, and adding to Google’s bottom line in the process.
  Marin Software, a company whose search marketing products are used to manage more than $1.3 billion in annual search spending, studied the impact […]

• From Russia, With (Search) Love

  Over the past few months I have had the opportunity to learn more about the current digital market and advertising opportunities in Russia from Preston Carey who is heading up Yandex’s new business opportunities outside of Russia. While China often gets the attention for its growth and opportunity, Preston showed me that Russia can […]

• Google Offers First US-Based Online Site Clinic

  For the first time, Google will provide advice to webmasters via a US-based site clinic on Google’s Webmaster Central blog. The company’s announcement says that members of Google’s Search Quality team “will determine trends and share corresponding best practices to improve site quality and user experience.”
  Google may be very purposely avoiding any mention of “SEO […]

• Google Upgrades (& Downgrades) Feedburner Stats

  Google has upgraded its Feedburner analytics product and, in the process, also added real-time stats for individual feed items. But it’s still a very limited product and, in a couple areas, actually seems to be a downgrade from the existing Feedburner stats.
  The new interface brings Feedburner’s “look and feel” much closer to what Google Analytics […]

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• 15 Killer Google Chrome Features You Might Not Know About, www.guidingtech.com

Business Issues

• Giving users the best answer, and competing fair and square in travel search, Google Public Policy Blog
• Travel Sites Oppose Google ITA Purchase, Wall Street Journal
• YPG Launches New Mega-Agency ‘Mediative’, screenwerk.com

Local, Maps & Mobile

• Google Places: Are Your Reviews Still Missing? Tell Google, Mike Blumenthal
• What Is "Google Offers"?, Internet2Go
• Google Tags Update: Google Giveth and Google Taketh Away, Mike Blumenthal
• Local University Denver Is in the Books!, blog.getlisted.org

Link Building

• Link Baiting and Viral Marketing with Venn Diagrams, blueglass.com
• Incorporating Geo-Targeting into Your Link Building, Search Engine Watch
• Using Linkbait to Create a Strong Online Presence, Search Engine Journal

Paid Search & Contextual

• The Report Center is retiring soon, Inside AdWords

Searching

• Insights into Multimedia Search User Behavior, Intent, and Consumption, Yahoo Search Blog
• Find the Question to your Yahoo Answers!, SEOmoz
• Google Search Quality Improving Or Not?, Search Engine Roundtable

SEM Industry

• SEO Birthday Re-launch Discount Special, seotrainingdojo.com

SEO & SEM

• Conversion Tracking: What To Do When It Doesn’t Work, PPC Hero
• Creating and Using an SEO Editorial Calendar, Michael Gray
• Five Frequently Asked Questions about Google’s Quality Score [PPC], Search Engine People
• Getting Smart with AdWords Re-Marketing, Search Engine Journal
• Google: Different Algorithms Can Apply To Different Sites At Different Times, Search Engine Roundtable
• How does Google determine domain age, and is it important for ranking?, YouTube
• How to write a killer blog post in 30 minutes or less, SEO Copywriting
• Is Google Custom Search Influencing Google Web Search?, SEO By The Sea
• Three Major Lessons from an SEO Amateur, dailyseotip.com

Social Media

• Facebook for BlackBerry v1.9 now in Beta Zone, Inside BlackBerry
• Facebook Tests New Page Admin Interface with Sidebar Navigation Links, Inside Facebook
• Did Digg game its own system to benefit publisher partners?, Dumplings from this Panda
• Social Impact on Search Behavior: Facebook and Bing, blueglass.com
• Social Media Marketing Checklist, Online Marketing Blog

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

• How to Add Transcripts to Your YouTube Videos – Sound SEO/marketing advice from Lisa Barone, put as a step by step tutorial outlining the benefits before the how-tos.
• Google Places now boosts AdWords – Google Boost enables business owners to easily create online search ads from directly within their Google Places account. No ongoing management is needed after the initial set up, and this beta is currently available to select local businesses in San Francisco, Houston and Chicago. To create an ad, all that is required is a short business description, a web or Place page, the business categories and a monthly budget.
• Do Real-Time Analytics Matter? – Are real-time analytics useful? Marshall Kirkpatrick looks at the pros and cons and shows how real-time analytics may help any number of publishers optimize highly flexible site layouts.
• Creating and Using an SEO Editorial Calendar – From an SEO perspective, an editorial calendar can has several points worth noting:
   
  You need to produce, publish, and link build to new content at least 30-45 days before you can expect it to rank (unless its a QDF term)You need to have a recycling strategy in place for old contentYou need to maximize the value of previous social media campaigns and think about how you are going use current and upcoming ones.
   
  While these strategies are important for every website, they are especially important for websites with seasonal content, like Halloween, the World Series, or new car models, as you only get a once-a-year opportunity to get it right.
   
• Major Travel Sites Unite to Oppose Google's ITA Purchase – Several popular online travel companies are joining forces to oppose Google Inc.'s proposed $700 million purchase of ITA Software Inc., the leading provider of flight data, saying the deal would give it too much sway over the travel sector.
  Expedia Inc., Kayak.com, Sabre Holdings and Farelogix Inc.—which operate half-a-dozen leading online travel sites—are forming a coalition called FairSearch.org to persuade the Justice Department to block Google's latest deal.
• Google Gets Real…time: 5 Ways to Influence the Conversation – @AntonKonikoff to tips @Sphinn:  In a continuous effort to provide users with the latest and most relevant information, Google has been adding numerous features to its Realtime search. So, what can Internet marketers achive with these new toys?
• Optimizing For Google TV – Vanessa Fox: "Google TV is here! It includes a full web browser, so if you have a lot of video content, you might want to optimize for larger screens and audiences who are sitting on their couches."