SearchCap: The Day In Search, September 23, 2009

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

From Search Engine Land:

• How To Measure The Value Of A Fan Or Follower In Social Media
  

  It’s hard to justify the time spent on social media account management. But there are ways to measure the real value (monetary or otherwise) of fans on Facebook and followers on Twitter. These top two social media websites offer free advertising, an open customer service and communication platform and a demographics database all wrapped up [...]

• What Happened To The Monthly Google Dance?
  

  Back in the ‘old days’ of Google and the SEO industry, “Google Dance” was a term used often in the industry. Back then, a “Google Dance” referred to the about monthly updates Google pushed out to their index. Every month or so, SEOs and Webmasters waited for the “Google Dance” to see [...]

• Search and the Business Manager: An SMX East Dream Agenda
  

  Now that Bruce has provided his dream agenda for SEOs, Matt for PPC, Jessica for the in-house crowd and Disa for the beginners, here’s a track for the business manager who needs to stay on top of the macro issues, develop investment cases and report back to HQ on future trends. You can have a [...]

• Google Sidewiki Allows Anyone To Comment About Any Site
  

  Google Sidewiki is a new feature being added today to the Google Toolbar that allows anyone to leave comments about pages as they surf the web. Love something you’re reading? Hate it? You can share your views with others who visit the page and who also have Sidewiki enabled. Share, that is, [...]

• Google Gains Volume, Bing Gains Share In August
  

  Yesterday comScore reported search numbers for August. What they show is growth in overall search volume, including at Google sites (except YouTube). Google has 2.5 times the search volume as Yahoo and Microsoft combined. But Microsoft’s Bing also grew its share of the overall US search market from 8.9 percent in July to 9.3 percent [...]

• No Colleague Left Behind: In-House SEO Education
  

  The most important asset for an in-house SEO is the collective talent of the people that plan, produce and maintain a company’s website. The better informed these individuals are about search engine optimization strategies and tactics, the better your chance of search engine success. Company-wide SEO education is, in fact, one of the key benefits [...]

• Valuable Customer Insights Via Search Engine Tools
  

  Forget about your SEO investment. Disregard your PPC budget. B2B marketers should be asking themselves, “Am I getting all I can from search engines… for free?” Consider this: searching is the second most popular online activity today — second only to email. In fact, comScore (August 2009) estimates that Google alone handles [...]

• What, Where, When: Travel & Local Search Combine @Goby.com
  

  Coming out of (private) and into public Beta today is a new hybrid travel and local search engine, Goby.com (GO-be), a new entrant into the foray of “deep web” search technology, led by a founding team with web and search experience from Endeca (CEO Mark Watkins), Lycos (Jim Fell) and Reprise Media (CTO Vince Russo), [...]

• Attributing Value To Phone Calls: Dynamic Number Insertion Can Help
  

  Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI) technology allows advertisers to track the specific search engine, web page or keyword that generated an inbound phone call using tracking numbers. Advertisers are using DNI to measure the performance of their online advertising campaigns and the impact on call volume. At the most basic level, DNI seamlessly replaces select contact [...]

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• Squidoo Aims To Make Brands Pay For Dedicated Web Dashboards, TechCrunch

Business Issues

• AOL Icon Runs Away With Popular Vote … at AOL-Sponsored Gala During Advertising Week, Ad Age
• Can We Please Have Jerry Back?, TechCrunch
• Google CEO sees one small acquisition a month, Reuters
• Me Too Mike, Me Too, TechCrunch

Local, Maps & Mobile

• Mobile Ad Spending to Gain Momentum, eMarketer

Link Building

• LinkExaminer: SEO Friendly Link Scanning Utility, Search Engine Journal

Paid Search & Contextual

• A Really Nasty Ad Slips Past Google, TechCrunch
• Google AdWords Accounts Hit With "Low Share of Voice" Notice, Search Engine Roundtable

Searching

• Search as Dialog, Huffington Post
• How I Like To Calculate Dates? Wolfram|Alpha It, Search Engine Roundtable
• Is Google Showing the Authoritative OneBox More Often?, Mike Blumenthal
• LIFE magazine now available on Google Books, Inside Google Books

SEM Industry

• Looking at Adtech – Day 1 from an SEO perspective, Search Cowboys
• Q&A: Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOmoz, Econsultancy
• SMX East ‘09 Live Live Blogging Schedule, Search Engine Roundtable

SEO & SEM

• How To Lose A PPC Customer in Ten Days or Less, SEM Geek
• Bending the Golden Triangle, Bruceclay.com.au
• Google Risk Management Strategy – When is the Best Time to Hire an SEO Professional?, SEO Book
• Google Says, Referrer Spam Does Not Hurt Your Google Rankings, Search Engine Roundtable
• Google Subscribed Links Patent: Why Do Some OneBox Results Require No Subscription?, SEO By The Sea
• Meta Tags and SEO for Google, John Andrews
• SEO Truths Or Should That Be SEEO?, The SEO Scoop

Social Media

• New: U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) 2.0, Goes All Out With Social Media, ResourceShelf
• Why Your Company Needs Social Media, Search Engine Journal

Video, Music & Image Search

• Five Stars Dominate Ratings, YouTube Blog
• Fast Forward: A New Online Video Collection From the Wharton School of Business and Google, ResourceShelf

Web Analytics

• New Video: Steps to Using the Analytics API, Google Analytics Blog

Other Items

• Google Library and Harvard Offer On-Demand Books, Espresso Book Machine Comes to Cambridge, ResourceShelf