SearchCap: The Day In Search, November 11, 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:

• Google Leads In Search Engines’ Efforts To Woo TV Viewers

  Google’s “Dear Sophie” TV spot for Chrome, in which a father creates a Gmail account for his newborn daughter and sends her multi-media messages as she grows up, earned the top spot in Ace Metrix’ rankings of websites’ TV advertisements. Despite being a recent and reluctant entrant to TV advertising, Google dominated the rankings with […]

• Search Engine Land Gets Sister Site: Marketing Land Arrives Next Month

  I’m happy to announce that next month, Search Engine Land will gain a new sister site: Marketing Land. Search Engine Land will continue to provide all the great coverage about search marketing and search engines that you love. Marketing Land will go beyond into other areas, including social media, affiliate marketing, email marketing and other […]

• Google’s 2011 Veterans Day Logo

  On Google.com today you will find a special logo honoring Veterans Day. The logo is of a tree with a yellow ribbon tied around it. The yellow ribbon in the United States normally goes with the slogan “support our troops”. The Google letters is made out of clouds on the light blue sky background behind […]

• Why Blending Usability & SEO Really Matters

  Whenever the phrase, “usability and SEO”, enter a conversation, there’s a very good chance it goes in one ear and out the other. Corporate management interprets it as “We need more money”, and middle management fixes their poker face until they’re free to run to Google to look up the term. Though there is improvement, […]

• How To Measure The True Return On Your Ad Spend

  Proprietary campaign management systems (eg AdWords, AdCenter, Facebook, etc) allow advertisers to track conversions and manage towards efficiency metrics such as Cost per Acquisition or Order (CPA / CPO). Some, such as AdWords and AdCenter, take performance management a bit further and allow advertisers to return a revenue value per conversion to report Return On […]

• Eye-Tracking In Google Maps: Study Shows Value Of No. 1 Ranking & Social Content

  A new eye-tracking and click-tracking study from Mediative (formerly known as Enquiro) shows the value of having the top spot in Google’s local results, but also suggests that social content and signals can boost rankings further down the page. Early last month, Mediative did eye tracking on 12 participants and online click tracking on another […]

• Now It’s Facebook’s Turn For 20 Years Of FTC Privacy Audits

  According to the New York Times and Wall Street Journal the world’s largest social network is nearing a settlement with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that will subject the company to 20 years of “privacy audits.” A nearly identical punishment was imposed earlier this year on Google over “deceptive privacy practices in Google’s rollout […]

• Google Acquires Katango ‘Magicians’ To Improve Google+ Circles

  Finding it too much hassle to organize your friends and contacts into circles on Google+? Google may have a solution on the way, thanks to the company’s acquisition of Katango. Katango launched this past summer with an iPhone app that automagically organizes Facebook friends through an algorithmic approach that looks at profile information, past interactions […]

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• Google Music ‘These Go to Eleven’ event announced for November 16th, www.theverge.com

Business Issues

• German state to sue Facebook over facial recognition feature, ZDNet
• Google Joins Kleiner Perkins’ Social sFund As A Strategic Partner, TechCrunch
• Twitter is going after another typo domain: Twittter.com (with an extra ‘t’), fusible.com

Link Building

• Google Patent on Displaying Breadcrumb Links in Search Results, SEO By The Sea
• Scalable Link Building Using Social Media – Whiteboard Friday, SEOmoz

Other Items

• Bringing the very best of what we do to the veteran community, Official Google Blog

Searching

• Bing Football Fans Rejoice: Streamlined NFL Answers Arrive, www.bing.com
• Google Kills Its Own "Timeline" Feature, Read/Write Web

SEM Industry

• Did You Miss #Pubcon? Recaps of Sessions & Links to Photos, Search Engine Journal
• PubCon 2011 Las Vegas Conference Live Blog Recap, Search Engine Roundtable
• Video: Google PageRank Update, Page Layout Search Ranking & Apple Siri Search, Search Engine Roundtable

SEO & SEM

• 20 Great Tools to Help Build Your SEO Skillset, Search Engine People
• Holiday Landing Page Optimization Techniques, PPC Hero
• How To Optimize A Web Page For A Keyword, Search Engine People
• Out Of Stock Items & SEO, Search Engine Roundtable
• SEO Tip: Titles matter, probably more than you think, Thumbtack Engineering

Social Media

• 8 Social Media Platforms (Other Than the Big 3) to Drive Traffic To Your Site, Social Media Today
• 4 Excellent Examples of Creative Google+ Business Pages, blog.hubspot.com
• Can A Twitter Account Be A Company Trade Secret?, paidContent.org
• How to Connect With Local Customers Via Facebook, www.socialmediaexaminer.com
• I Saw Facebook’s New Timeline For iPhone Last Night And It’s Incredible, www.businessinsider.com
• Tweets and Likes Are Nice. But Measuring Your Results Are Even Better, smallbiztechnology.com

Web Analytics

• The horror: Google now encrypts up to 33% of search referral data, econsultancy.com
• When Google Analytics Filters Go Wrong, www.johnfdoherty.com
• You can now see mobile ad performance in Google Analytics., Google Analytics Blog

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

• Goodbye Sphinn … Hello Marketing Land! – We’re thrilled to share this news: Sphinn will soon be re-launched as a new, editorial site called Marketing Land!
  Marketing Land will provide daily news coverage, regular columns and other features about the broader topic of online marketing. This will include areas such as social media, e-mail marketing, affiliate marketing, analytics and much more. We’re aiming to launch formally on December 11, 2011, with a soft launch a week or two before that. When the soft launch happens, the site’s domain will change to MarketingLand.com. Currently, that works to redirect people here.
• SEO Tip: Titles matter, probably more than you think – Interesting case study about A/B testing changes to page titles.
• How To Identify True Search Competitors – SEO Competitive Analysis – Very in-depth, detailed post with examples.

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.