SearchCap: The Day In Search, December 7, 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:

• 4 New Year’s Resolutions Every Digital Marketer Can’t Live Without

  Over the last 6 months in this column we have looked at all aspects of the overlap between search and display, from why search marketers could take over the world media budgets of the future, to advanced methods for retargeting and simple alternatives to attribution modeling. So to round out the year, we revisit the […]

• FindTheBest Succeeds Where Google Squared Failed

  During his written responses to questions from the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt identified a range of competitors that Google faces in the market today. Some were well-known and some more obscure. One of the smaller companies that Schmidt mentioned was FindTheBest. He identified the company in a list of […]

• What Brands Need To Know About Google+ AdWords Social Extensions

  Google’s early gaffe of not adequately addressing the demand for brand pages for Google+ has quietly given way to several new business-oriented Google+ features for in-house marketers to utilize. Brand pages, social extensions and a trusted verification process are all features in-house marketers should immediately engage with to increase their Google+ counts and brand profiles. […]

• Google Quality Raters Can’t Cause Site To Drop In Rankings

  Pot Pie Girl has been busy the past couple months, first by publishing the Google quality raters guidelines and then by analyzing the forums to see how they rate things. One thing she said was that she believed these quality raters can raise a red flag at Google and lead to a downgrade in your […]

• SMX Israel Returns To Jerusalem On January 15, 2012

  SMX is returning to Israel this January 15, 2012. SMX Israel will take place in Jerusalem, Israel at the Inbal Hotel on Sunday, January 15th. It is just about a month away and we urge anyone interested to register immediately – it only costs $150! The agenda is now live over here and we are […]

• Chinese Search Engine Baidu Will Spend A Half-Billion Dollars To Train SEOs & Get Small Businesses Online

  Chinese search engine Baidu will reportedly spend nearly a half-billion dollars to bring small businesses online and, among other things, train 100,000 search marketing professionals in China. As reported by both NASDAQ and AMP, Baidu will make a $470 million investment in China’s online market between now and the end of 2015. The NASDAQ article […]

• 21 Types Of Social Content To Boost Your SEO

  I’ve written often about the benefits of going viral in both content and marketing strategies. Increasingly, however, social media content (a.k.a. viral content) does more than increase brand recognition and site traffic: it can also boost your SEO signals. As search engines pay more and more attention to social signals, going viral is rapidly becoming […]

• ‘Tis The Season For Link Baiting

  Ah, the holidays! It’s that time of year — for egg nog, carolers, sleigh rides, Yuletide cheer, roasting chestnuts, and… link bait! Yes, you heard right. The holidays are a great time to launch link bait campaigns, because you can piggy-back on the popularity of the holiday and of peoples’ enthusiasm for it. That doesn’t […]

• Austria? That’s Not A Country, Says Google: Australia’s A Country

  First Google questioned Mitt Romney’s chances of winning the US presidential election. Now it’s suggesting that Austria is less important than Australia. You Say Austria, Google Says Australia In a search for Austria’s biggest companies, Google automatically changes the query and searches instead for Australia’s biggest companies: Forbes spotted the glitch, which is the second major problem […]

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

• Yelp Users Can Now Edit Business Details On The Go
• Facebook Subscribe Button Announced, Will Be Launching “Soon”
• SMX Social Media Marketing 2011: Day Two Recap
• Twitter: Life, Death & Soccer Get Most Tweets Per Second In 2011

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• Bing Introducing a Streamlined Redemption Center and New Bing Rewards, Bing Search Blog
• Google Remembers Your Old Passwords, Google Operating System

Business Issues

• Google to finance affordable housing in Mountain View, Mercury News
• Guy In Charge Of Google+’s Google Bar Joins Path, TechCrunch
• Inside Google London: A park, a coffee lab, and nightclub-style meeting rooms, Pocket-lint
• Why data matters for public policy, Policy by the Numbers
• Yahoo Building New York Studio, The Hollywood Reporter
• Yahoo Seeks Better Terms From Bidders, Wall Street Journal
• Eric Schmidt at LeWeb, SiliconFilter

Link Building

• White-Hat Alternatives to Link Exchanges and Directories, Search Engine People

Paid Search & Contextual

• Release Announcement: adCenter Desktop December 2011 Upgrade, adCenter Blog
• Set up a crawler login for increased ad relevancy on pages behind a login, Inside AdSense

Searching

• A Year of Curiosities: Australia’s Top Google Searches 2011, Official Google Australia Blog
• History: New Online Database: Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Daily Schedule (via FDR Presidential Library), infodocket.com
• Meet The New BOSS: Yahoo! Search launches a new home for Search BOSS and three new offerings, Yahoo Search Blog
• Science: The Habitable Exoplanets Catalog, a New Online Database of Habitable Worlds, infodocket.com
• U. of Texas at Austin: Digital Archive of Guatemala’s Police Force Launched at Conference, infodocket.com

SEM Industry

• Honest SEO Conference Advice, State of Search
• Introducing the 12 Days of SEO, Outspoken Media
• You Gotta Be Crazy To Do SEO – But We’d Do It Again In A Heartbeat, Search Engine People

SEO & SEM

• Ad Extensions in 5 Day Series: Call Extensions, PPC Hero
• Google Can’t Stop Google From Spamming Google With Google Spam, SEO Book
• The Future of Google Shopping, distilled
• UGC: Starting and Scaling, managinggreatness.com
• 4 PPC Mistakes that Kill Your Career, PPC Hero
• A Holistic Approach to Rethinking Your Keyword Strategy, Part 1, Conductor Blog
• A One-Stop SEO Bookmarklet to Quickly Review On-Site SEO, SEOmoz
• Debunking Google’s Propaganda, Holistic Search Marketing
• Five Quick Checks for Transforming Your AdWords Account in Less Than an Hour, MarketingProfs
• Fresh Index opened up for Free Users, Majestic SEO Blog
• Getting More SEO Value from Your Social Updates, Daily SEO Tip
• Google Search Results Shuffle In Early December?, Search Engine Roundtable
• How Long Does it Take SEO To Work?, SEO Theory
• SEO Claims Google Panda Recovery By Moving To New Site, Search Engine Roundtable
• The Number 1 Mistake New SEO Consultants Make, sugarrae.com
• The Other Googles: Succeeding on Foreign Search Engines, Search Engine Watch

Social Media

• Facebook Timeline Rollout Starts Today In New Zealand, TechCrunch
• A Faster Facebook for Android, blog.facebook.com
• Millions Of People Became Facebook “Developers” Just For Timeline Access, TechCrunch
• Planking, Charlie Sheen and Stupid Acronyms: A Facebook Memeology of 2011, Wired
• Show your love for charities on Google+ this holiday season, Official Google Blog

Video, Music & Image Search

• Google Image Search Tests a New Tablet Interface, Google Operating System
• Apple’s Hiring To Improve Siri, Possibly Readying API For Third Parties, TechCrunch
• Continuous improvements with Google Goggles 1.7, Official Google Mobile Blog