SearchCap: The Day In Search, January 28, 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:

• Pew: Young Or Old, Search Cuts Across Age Categories
  The Pew Internet & American Life Project has come out with a fairly comprehensive look at generations and internet activity, called “Generations Online.” The report segments users by age categories (i.e., X, Y, Boomers) and looks their online activities. The data were drawn from responses by thousands of users to surveys conducted by Pew researchers between 2006 and 2008.
• Content: The Once, Current & Future King Of Big Site SEO
  All web sites, whether large or small, have many of the same search engine optimization challenges. Since the beginning of interactive time, it has been a struggle for many business websites to find their voice and to provide meaningful content to the Internet audience. At Agency.com we see this struggle every day, particularly in an environment where our clients are the ones in charge of creating and managing the text and digital asset contents of large corporate web sites. …
• Measuring An Ad’s Value: Webcast Tomorrow
  Tomorrow, Thursday January 29 at 1 PM EST, our sister site Search Marketing Now hosts a webcast designed to help online advertisers determine best practices for measuring and valuing an ad. “Attribution Management Forum 2.0” will include a series of polling questions that get to the heart of just how to give credit to an individual ad or team of ads – over time, in relationship to other products, and when it’s part of a campaign that involves other ads, both online and offline. Adam Goldberg of ClearSaleing will be the main speaker, and he’ll share the results of …
• Search Week: January 26, 2008
  Search Week is an exclusive monthly newsletter for Search Engine Land premium members that recaps stories covered on Search Engine Land over the past month. Below are top stories organized by topic that happened over the past week. Each topic (or Search Engine Land column) is also a link, where you can click through and drill into the Search Engine Land members library to find other stories in that area. Because some stories are listed in more than one category, you may see them repeated.
• Your 2009 Marketing Budget: Why It’s Worth Revisiting
  Despite the fact that we are already a month into the new year, and that you probably made a valiant effort in putting together your 2009 marketing budget, you just might want to revisit it. Why? Because given the current economic conditions, it’s more important than ever to get the most out of your marketing dollars, and you could very well be headed for trouble if in your process you either assumed a similar media allocation as previous years, or created your search budget and strategy without factoring in other channels.
• Click Fraud Rate Hits Highest Level Yet
  Click fraud is worse today than ever according to an announcement from tracking company Click Forensics. Click Forensics estimates the overall average click fraud rate for Q4 2008 at 17.1%, the highest level since they began tracking it in 2006. That rate is up from 16.0% in Q3 2008 and from the 16.6% rate reported in Q4 2007. Click fraud estimates on the search engine content networks are said to be at 28.2%, up from 27.1% in Q3.
• Change (and In-House SEO)
  Change is a popular word lately, and living in DC area the theme is practically unavoidable. You can even buy (a shiny version of) change at the mall. I walked through a Macy’s department store last week and passed a large rack of sparkly “Change” pins for sale. Change is everywhere.
• Yahoo Tries To Justify Automatic Account Optimization
  Three weeks after the latest uproar over its decision to auto-optimize sponsored search accounts, Yahoo has published an explanation under the brassy headline, “The Truth about Account Optimizations.” As a refresher, earlier this month Yahoo emailed advertisers about its new Terms and Conditions, which says that Yahoo may create ads, edit keywords, and/or optimize the accounts of U.S. advertisers not bound by an Insertion Order. Search marketers were exasperated.
• SPONSOR MESSAGE: Are you the “Biggest Search Geek”? Find out at biggestsearchgeek.com!
  Do you know your SEM publishers & history inside-and-out? Can you negative match your “Tom” from your “Cruise” in your sleep? Then take the SMX Biggest Search Geek Challenge sponsored by Marin Software at www.biggestsearchgeek.com. The Geek with the highest score wins a trip for two to SMX West and receives their award on-stage from Danny Sullivan!

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• New in Labs: Offline Gmail, Official Gmail Blog
• Want in Google News But Don’t Have Three Digits in URL? Get a Sitemap, Search Engine Roundtable
• Yahoo Quietly Shutters Yahoo Pets [grin], blog.dogster.com

Business Issues

• AOL
  axing 700 employees, TechCrunch
• AOL
  CEO Randy Falco’s Entire Memo to the Troops on Layoffs, AllThingsD
  by Kara Swisher
• Digg
  Poaches New Head Of Sales From Yahoo, TechCrunch
• Exclusive:
  AOL to Layoff 10 Percent of Staff, Cutting 700, Due to Ad Meltdown and Refocusing
  on New Structure, kara.allthingsd.com
• Google Not
  Immune to Upstart Search Engines, Ad Age
• Google’s
  Schmidt, 12 Other Executives Meet With Obama, Bloomberg
• MySpace
  fights Yahoo and MSN for ad cash, www.ft.com
• What Would Google Do?, Newsweek.com
• Yahoo’s New Era, Search
  Engine Watch

Local, Maps & Mobile

• Google Earth reveals hidden oasis, www.birdlife.org
• More Open-Source Goodies for Flash API Developers: DragZoomControl, MarkerTracker, Google Geo Developers Blog
• Review: The KML Handbook, Google Earth Blog
• Vancouver in 3D in Google Earth, Google Earth Blog

Other Items

• More computing, less power, Official Google Blog
• Google University Research Awards, Official Google Research Blog
• Introducing Measurement Lab, Official Google Blog

Paid Search & Contextual

• Add on to AdSense, Inside AdSense
• Do more with less — Part 2 of 3, Inside AdWords
• Getting More Acquainted Via Twitter & Facebook, adCenter Blog for Advertisers
• How To Decrease Your PPC Spend Smartly and Quickly, PPC Hero
• New AdWords Help Videos, Inside AdWords
• Utilizing Match Types in MSN to Increase Traffic and Leads, PPC Hero

Searching

• What the Web knows about you, ComputerWorld
• Google Helps Parents Catch Son Searching For Porn, Search Engine Roundtable
• Is Google Politically Biasing Search Results?, Search Engine Roundtable

SEM Industry

• Six Questions with Debra Mastaler, BruceClay.com
• Where Do New SEOs Go Wrong When They Set Learning Priorities?, SEO Book
• Beware: I’ve Got a Twitter Impersonator, Barry Schwartz
• Brian Ussery: Search Blogger of the Day, The SEO Scoop
• British Prime Minister Gordon Brown visits search marketing company Weboptimiser, Leon Bailey Green
• IM Spring Break Conference Speakers & Agenda Announced, Search Engine Journal
• New way to get on Techmeme: send tips to Techmeme via Twitter, Techmeme
• SEO Quality Score Tool Startup Secures $4M, MediaPost
• Yet Another SEM Automation Tool, Funded, www.traffick.com

SEO & SEM

• Hey Google: Not Having an XML Sitemap is Not an Error, Small Business SEM
• Google’s .edu Domain Love: Department of Economics ≠ Mortgage, or Does It?, SEO Book
• International SEO and localisation is the key to surviving the recession, econsultancy.com
• Should You Have Multiple Websites?, SEO Book
• Universal Search Optimization Chart, www.prospectmx.com
• Vacillating about hiring an SEM Agency? Would you build your own house?, Closed Loop Marketing Blog

Social Media

• 5 Steps to Going Viral on Twitter, www.copyblogger.com
• Announcing the AllFacebook Pages Tracker, All Facebook
• Facebook begins testing ad-driven polls, VentureBeat
• How to Search for People Across Many Social Networks, Search Engine Journal
• How Well Do You Use Your Twittersphere?, The SEO Scoop
• Using LinkedIn For SEO, www.seo.com
• What My Kids Taught Me About Social Media, Search Engine Guide

Video, Music & Image Search

• Find Images that Have a Certain Size, Google Operating System

Web Analytics

• Mastering Motion Charts – Trend Analysis, Google Analytics Blog

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

• 3 SEO Strategies (Not Tactics) To Make You Think
• 5 Critical AdWords Reports for Optimal PPC Optimization
• Are you looking for a Job in SEO?
• 10 Ways Journalists and Newsrooms Can Conquer SEO
• SEO and Internal Linking
• Link building best practices checklist
• Is Search evolving into Online Anthropology?

About The Author

Matt McGee

Matt McGee joined Third Door Media as a writer/reporter/editor in September 2008. He served as Editor-In-Chief from January 2013 until his departure in July 2017. He can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee.