SearchCap: The Day In Search, September 28, 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: How To Use Referrers To Track Link Building Efforts Last month, I wrote about how to use your site’s bounce rate for link building purposes. Someone emailed me privately to ask […]

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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 Use Referrers To Track Link Building Efforts

    Last month, I wrote about how to use your site’s bounce rate for link building purposes. Someone emailed me privately to ask if there were any other (perhaps not so standard) metrics that I used outside of toolbar PageRank, keyword rankings, and traffic. In an effort to see if I could find something I’ve never […]

  • Twitter Attempts To Turn Back The App Tide

    Twitter’s recent interface update is probably the single biggest change to the site since its launch. By expanding its columns to see multimedia content straight from tweets, it shows that Twitter is looking at how to engage a wider audience, and to provide a richer experience for advertisers.
    By keeping the roll-out to Twitter.com, it also […]

  • Report: Google Buying Social Calendar, Acquisition Count Dwarfs Rivals

    It’s being reported this morning that Google is buying a “social calendar” for mobile devices called Plannr (we’re back to the heady vowel-free days). There have been a number of largely unsuccessful efforts to create group or social calendars in the past and there are several existing competitors in the segment, most notably Plancast.
    The app […]

  • Create A Global SEO Center Of Excellence

    My last article on Integrating Search into the Localization Process prompted a few emails from people asking what other areas are important to the process, and how they can integrate them into the SEO process. My recommendation has always been to develop a search council or search center of excellence (COE) that fosters […]

  • Xmarks Shuts Down After Failing To Sell Its Search Engine

    Xmarks, the popular browser bookmark synchronization service, is going to shut down on January 10, 2011. Xmarks is a free service that saves your bookmarks across different browsers and different computers, and currently boasts about two million users. I’m a longtime user and fan of the service, going back to when it was called Foxmarks; […]

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

Business Issues

Local, Maps & Mobile

Link Building

Paid Search & Contextual

Searching

SEM Industry

SEO & SEM

Social Media

Video, Music & Image Search

Web Analytics

Other Items

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

  • End of the Road for Xmarks (and a telling look at their search challenges) – It is sad to see Xmarks go – they are sending out a 3 month notice to users.However what is relevant to a Sphinn audience in this in-depth article are all the experiements they did with search queries for different types of data, and what worked with bookmarking data.You could extrapolate that to suggest that similar data would be useful to Google in a similar way from their own bookmarking features, and likewise Delicious for Yahoo.
  • 23 Ways To Slam-Dunk Your Mobile Conversions For The Holidays – People already start feeling having a Mobile Version of their Website, Brian Klais General Manager and Vice President of Product Management at Covario nailed some important issues on Mobile Conversions.
  • How to Sell a Domain Name – Excellent advice from the Domain King.
  • Why the Professional Restaurant Critic Will Survive the Age of Yelp – An interesting piece by a professional food critic who says you can't trust Yelp, only 0.5% of Yelp users don't have an agenda, and the reviews are filled with "the gushers, the haters, the incoherent, and endless excla­mation points." Those of us in the marketing industry know the power of user reviews and Yelp in general. Here's an opposing viewpoint.
  • Everything You Wanted To Know About YouTube Embed Codes – How do you turn off auto-play when embedding a YouTube video? Make it start at a particular point. The answer to this and other controls are covered here.
  • Twitter To Start Selling Followers – It was bound to happen, they have to make money some how right?  "Advertisers will be allowed to purchase placement in lists of "who to follow" recommendations targeted to users with particular interests on Twitter"……
  • Why Google Shouldn't Clean Up Search – "An open, nasty but honest web is better than Google sanitising search, argues article author Nicole Kobie, It’s clearly a fine balance, but is it really up to Google to manage the web for us?  Amit Singhal responds:  "Blocking sites isn't always as clear cut as racis"….
  • How to Pitch A Tech Blogger – Mark McLeod Hendrickson's experience as both a tech writer (for TechCrunch, ~1.5 years) and internet startup entrepreneur has enabled to see things from both sides of the table, particularly when it comes to PR for newly founded startups. In this article he provides info on pitching to tech bloggers that he's learned through the years.
  • Silos, Architecture, and Linking…Oh My! – Stoney deGeyter describes how to create the perfect site architecture for a large site that works well for users and search engines alike.
  • Link Building The Philanthropic Way – Are there ways to use charitable campaigns to build links?  Annabel Hodges writes an amusing and factual piece at ways a company can use it's philanthropic endeavors to build awareness and links.

About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.

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