SearchCap: The Day In Search, April 5, 2012

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

From Search Engine Land:

• Group: Google Should Halt All Online Dating Ads Until They’re Sure None Are Fronts For Human Trafficking

  Google says it’s spending “millions of dollars” to police AdWords ads to ensure they’re not contributing to human trafficking, but the head of a victim’s rights group seems to believe that’s not enough. Asked what he thinks Google should do, Philip J. Cenedella of the National Association of Human Trafficking Victim Advocates (NAHTVA) says they […]

• The SEO Breakdown: Bank Information Center Site Audit

  As part of a site audit special series, we’re going to review an interesting website, Bank Information Center (BIC). BIC is a non-profit organization that does some very cool things but, like most non-profits, hasn’t updated their website for many years. Needless to say, they have almost no Internet marketing or SEO strategy which led them […]

• Google: No, We Don’t Use Akismet To Catch Link Spam

  There are some rumors going across the SEO channels that Google is using data from comment spam filter Akismet. Those rumors are untrue. A Google spokesperson told us “we don’t use Akismet to flag spam.” The SEOs were using the classic correlation is equal to causation. Where a couple webmasters received one of those unnatural […]

• Lawmakers Question Whether Google Adequately Reviews Ads Potentially Related To Human Trafficking

  Lawmakers Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) are concerned that Google is profiting from advertisements placed by sex traffickers, expressing these fears in a joint letter to CEO Larry Page. The missive seeks reassurances of the company’s commitment to ferreting out ads that contribute to the activity. “Whatever Google is doing or not doing […]

• What Is The Real Value Of Branded Search Campaigns?

  Enterprise SEM practices apply not just to direct response advertisers, but to brand advertisers as well. We’ll dive into that logic after a brief stroll down memory lane. The earliest adopters of sophisticated paid search practices were those companies with deep roots in direct response marketing. In e-commerce, it was the traditional catalog companies that […]

• Google Loses Search PR Director Gabriel Stricker To Twitter

  Gabriel Stricker is still listed on Google as Director of Communications, Search. However he’s now VP of Communications for Twitter. He follows Karen Wickre, Google’s former Senior Media Liaison, who joined Twitter about seven months ago. And quite some time before that, Carolyn Penner left Google’s PR team for Twitter. I also noticed that Shailesh […]

Recent Headlines From MarTech, Our Sister Site Dedicated To Internet Marketing:

• Larry Page Gives An “Update” After His First Year As CEO
• Is Google Letting Anyone Do “Scientific” Surveys A Good Thing?
• Survey: Nearly 80% Trust Google As Much Or More Than A Year Ago
• Google Really Wants Businesses To Mobilize, Offering Free Sites to Small Busineses
• Marketing Tactics For The New iPad: What Analytics Can We Turn To?
• Is Your Mobile Visibility Nonexistent?
• Dissecting “Hot On Google+,” A Look At How Posts Become Hot
• 77 Percent Of Us Want To Get Marketing Messages Via Email & There’s No Close Second Place, Study Says

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• Yandex Launches Free Storage Service, Yandex

Business Issues

• A Change to Our Retailer Partner Program: eBooks Resellers to Wind Down Next Year, Inside Google Books
• Facebook Picks Nasdaq for I.P.O., New York Times
• Google Restarts M&A Plan, Gets Ready To Buy, Forbes
• Google to build its first thermal storage for a data center, gigaom.com
• Google’s Marissa Mayer: Passion is a gender-neutralizing force, CNN.com
• Google’s YouTube Must Defend Viacom Suit, Appeals Court Says, Bloomberg

Link Building

• 3 Starting Points for a Link Marketing Campaign, Search Engine Watch
• Adapt Your Link Building Strategy…Or Get Left Behind, Vertical Measures
• Click Here is the Most Powerful Link Anchor Text You Can Use, SEO Theory

Local, Maps & Mobile

• Weather Layer now available in the Google Maps API, Google Geo Developers Blog
• BrightLocal Adds Hot New Features to Local Search Rank Checker, marketing-blog.catalystemarketing.com
• Help improve the “blue dot” for people visiting your venue, Google LatLong
• Reach Mobile Users and Grow Your Business with the Bing Business Portal (Beta), adCenter Blog
• Wikipedia’s Mobile Apps Drop Google Maps for OpenStreetMap, TechCrunch

Paid Search & Contextual

• Display Campaign Optimizer Available to All, Inside AdWords
• Introducing UK promotions and deals from Google Affiliate Network, Inside AdSense

Searching

• Find Arc Length Calculations for Calculus with Wolfram|Alpha, Wolfram|Alpha Blog

SEM Industry

• Exclusive: Danny Sullivan About Personalization, Privacy, Not Being Impartial and SMX, State of Search

SEO & SEM

• Biquitous Website and SEO Audit: Proliability.com [Video], biquitous.com
• Google Favors Google+ Less In Search Results, WebProNews
• 5 Things You Should Not Do on Google Places, Search Engine People
• 8 SEO Pointers for Ecommerce Product Pages, www.practicalecommerce.com
• We Got Hacked, Here’s What We Found, thenextweb.com
• What’s Better – On-page SEO or Link-building?, SEOmoz

Social Media

• Twitter Automation vs. Personalization, Search Engine Watch

Video, Music & Image Search

• How we’re making even more 3D video available on YouTube, YouTube Blog

Web Analytics

• The Perfect Google Analytics Dashboard, portent.com