SearchCap: The Day In Search, March 16, 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:

• Transcript: Google & Bing On Whitelists & Exception Lists

  Last week at our SMX West show, Google and Bing spoke about how sites might get excepted from being harmed by particular signals in their search algorithms. Whitelists? Exception lists? List overrides? What’s it all mean? Below, a transcript of the answers, so you can read exactly what was said for yourself. The question came […]

• Compete Confirms Bing Gains

  Last week both comScore and Hitwise showed gains for Bing. Meanwhile Google was off 2% according to both metrics firms. Today Compete released data that confirm the direction of the earlier figures: Bing up, Google off slightly: According to Compete, both Google and Yahoo very modestly lost share, AOL and Ask were flat while Bing […]

• 4 Tips To Make Your Content Strategy Pay Off For B2B SEO

  Build it, and they will come. That’s what Dan thought when he devised his B2B content strategy. But four months into it, he wondered where he had gone wrong. His site had received little traffic from his content efforts. Unfortunately, he had made the same mistake many B2B marketers do. What Content Can Do For […]

• Facebook Patents Social Search

  Has Facebook patented social search? It appears so, according to a patent awarded earlier this year by the USPTO. The patent, written the same year Facebook was founded, has been previously discussed but escaped our notice until now. Originally filed in October 2004 and awarded this past February, the patent is for a system that […]

• New: Topsy Launches Real-Time Video Search

  Topsy has just launched a new search engine that surfaces hot videos that are being shared on Twitter. The company announced Topsy video search this afternoon via its Twitter account. The new video search functions similarly to Topsy’s other search tools — web (links), tweets and photos. Results appear to be ranked based on several […]

• Google Mobile iPhone App Gets Overhaul, Becomes Google Search App

  Goodbye Google Mobile App for iPhone. Hello Google Search App. A new version of the Google app is now available for the iPhone, and this isn’t just a minor feature update — it’s a pretty comprehensive overhaul of the app’s look and functionality. It begins with the app’s “home” page (for lack of a better […]

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• News visits soar after earthquake and tsunami in Japan, Experian Hitwise
• Introducing discussions in Google Docs, Google Docs Blog
• New connection bar in Gmail for iPhone, Official Gmail Blog
• You’re changing the world. We want to help., Official Google Blog

Business Issues

• How Google and Bing brands fared on Twitter after Japan quake, seattletimes.nwsource.com
• Zillow Is Said to Hire Citigroup to Manage Initial Share Sale, BusinessWeek

Local, Maps & Mobile

• Maps APIs over SSL now available to all, Google Geo Developers Blog

Link Building

• 5 Top Tips for Multilingual Link-Building, Search Engine Journal

Searching

• Google Alerts Removes Clickable Previews, Search Engine Roundtable
• Google’s the Largest Torrent Search Engine, isoHunt Tells Court, torrentfreak.com
• Suggestion: Google Amber Alerts, Search Engine Roundtable

SEM Industry

• Announcing BlueGlass Australia: Down Under’s New Agency of Record, blueglass.com

SEO & SEM

• Beat That Quote, Car insurance Aggregator!, explicitly.me
• Does Google recognize the difference between different meanings of a word in a query?, YouTube
• Google’s Next Target: Keyword Rich Domain Names?, Search Engine Roundtable
• How To Remove Old Google Cache Content, Search Engine Roundtable
• Moving Web Host: What Does It Involve?, Search Engine People
• Restricting Robot Access for Improved SEO, SEOmoz
• Top 4 Reasons to Abandon SEO, Marketing Pilgrim
• Who Needs Profits…When You’ve Got Good Rankings?!!, Search Engine Guide

Social Media

• BBM Social Platform – Now in Beta!, BlackBerry Developer’s Blog
• Making Twitter more secure: HTTPS, Twitter Blog

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

• Discussion: Overrated SEO Tactics? – Since we covered underrated SEO tactics last time, the "Discussion of the Week" this week flips that question around: What's the most overrated SEO tactic in your opinion? The floor is open!
• EdgeRank – What Does It Mean for Brands? – EdgeRank got you down? You're not as visible as you were before on Facebook? Alex Smith shares some good thoughts on how to make sure you maintain what visibility you have, or get back what you lost.
• Beat That Quote, Car insurance Aggregator! – Is Google screwing about with UK Car Insurance Autocomplete (or Suggest as we know it) results? Maybe. And there is data to suggest it. Rishi Lakhani investigates the impact of –possibly manipulated– Google Suggest phrases [brand + product] on search volume, and concludes those might make massive changes in increase revenue from the SERPs.
• Money Making Email Insights – How the subject line can be one of the key elements of an email marketing campaign
• A Model For Link Building: Beyond “Great Content” – Reasonable thoughts, and advice, from Ross Hudgens. Grab some popcorn, then study the outlined link building model. Here's a tidbit: "Content isn’t everything. Content isn’t the only thing. Often, it’s not a thing at all. I would say 'content is king' is accurate, but only because there are only 44 current monarchs, the system doesn’t work everywhere, and those monarchies only account for a small proportion of the world’s population."
• 6 Reasons Why Q-and-A Sites Can Boost Your SEO in 2011 (Despite Google's Farmer Update) – A lot of SEO predictions for 2011 were published in the end of 2010, while not many marketers mentioned the increasing popularity of Q&A;sites. I think that it could be a great opportunity to exploit this new rising phenomenon for our marketing efforts while it's still fresh.