SearchCap: The Day In Search, November 29, 2007

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

From Search Engine Land:

• 
  Yahoo Testing “Neighbors” Organizing Tool For Local
  Yahoo has always been an innovator in local, and today the company is rolling out (only in two California markets) a new and innovative feature that allows community members to identify, discuss, and potentially organize around local issues of concern. Called “Neighbors,” it combines functionality found on Yahoo’s suggestion boards…
• 
  ACAP Launches, Robots.txt 2.0 For Blocking Search Engines?
  After a year of discussions, ACAP — Automated Content Access Protocol — was released today as a sort of robots.txt 2.0 system for telling search engines what they can or can’t include in their listings. However, none of the major search engines support ACAP, and its future remains firmly one…
• 
  Yahoo Search Marketing Adds Campaign Bid Tune-Up & More
  Yahoo Search Marketing has announced two new features to help advertisers run their accounts. The two features include: Campaign Bid Tune-Up: This tool helps advertisers optimize their campaigns by giving them suggested keyword bids and daily spending limits. Saved Preferences: Finally, when you change your column views, those changes will…
• 
  Yahoo Seeks To Boost Europe Operation With New Hire
  According to the Guardian, “Yahoo has appointed BlackBerry and former Orange executive Kristof Fahy to a top marketing role to revitalise the company’s brand across Europe.” Fahy is a seasoned executive facing a challenging time for Yahoo, which has properties across Europe that are performing in an uneven fashion. The…
• 
  Yahoo Contextual Ads To Power “Ads For Adobe PDF”
  Yahoo, Adobe team on PDF ads from News.com reports Yahoo and Adobe are working together to monetize PDF documents. Over at the Adobe Labs you can find a new product named Ads for Adobe PDF. Yahoo will be powering the ads within PDF documents that are contextually relevant to the…
• 
  Facebook To Potentially Change Beacon After Privacy Furor
  Facebook has faced a steady stream of complaints, negative PR, and other criticism after rolling out the “Beacon” component of its new suite of advertiser tools and programs. For those who aren’t up on it, Beacon captures actions and transactions Facebook users conduct on third-party sites and essentially broadcasts those…
• 
  Directly Influence Your Google Search Results At Google Experimental
  Google Digg-Style Experiment from Googlified was one of the first to report a new experimental search feature from Google. As you can see from the screen capture below, this new feature enables users to vote up a search result or completely remove a search result from the index….
• 
  The “Design” Part Of Search-Engine Friendly Design
  For the past few years, I have been silently listening to and observing other search engine optimization (SEO) professionals speak and write about the topic of search-engine friendly web site design. I’m the one in the back with the black wig, sunglasses, mustache, and trench coat. All joking aside,…
• 
  Search Spam Is Getting More Dangerous Every Day
  Search spam, using techniques that manipulate the search results, is becoming more dangerous each and every day. Some search spammers go as far as hacking sites to inject link spam into unsuspecting web pages. And some go even further by polluting the search results with nasty malware. Yesterday we covered…
• 
  Managing Your Small Business Blogging Schedule
  I’m not a blogger—I just play one on the Internet. There are a lot of professional bloggers out there. I’m not one of them. Like many small business owners that also happen to blog, I have to find ways to balance my time between the demands of running a…

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• Group chat and rich emoticons now available in Gmail chat, Official Gmail Blog
• Spammers Giving Up? Google Thinks So, Wired
• Yahoo! concocts a spicier new version of Widgets and Konfabulator, Download Squad

Business Issues

• Google gets extension in Northeastern patent suit, InfoWorld
• MSN’s ‘stuffing the tail back into the head’ strategy, News.com
• Privacy Groups Ready FTC Complaint Against Facebook, MediaPost

Conferences

• Meet our AdWords Evangelist in Las Vegas, Inside AdWords
• Yahoo! in Chicago and Vegas, Yahoo Search Blog

Local, Maps & Mobile

• Google Earth Evolution, Google Earth Blog
• Yahoo! Local Offers New Suggestions Tool, Screenwerk

Link Building

• Google Selling PageRank 7 Links on Google.com Domain, Search Engine Roundtable
• 5 Best Reasons to Build Links In-House, Search Engine Watch

Paid Search & Contextual

• Use These 5 Holiday Tips To Help Increase Your PPC Revenue, PPC Hero
• Google Says AdWords Diagnostic Tool Bug Now Fixed, Search Engine Roundtable

Searching

• 10 Semantic Apps to Watch, Read/Write Web
• Amazon launches Askville.com, Reuters
• Fake .CN Google Spam "A Huge" Malware Problem, Search Engine Roundtable
• Google expunges malware sites from search results, ComputerWorld
• Questville: We got some Good and Bad news…, Askville Blog
• Student Using Human Brain Mapping to Power Image Search Engine, Search Engine Journal

SEM Industry

• SEMPO Launches 2007 State of the Market Survey, Web Analytics World
• SES Chicago Interview: Kevin Ryan and Kevin Heisler, Online Marketing Blog
• The DazzlinDonna Blog Celebrates Its First Year, DazzlinDonna
• Why Sphinn Matters So Much to Me, AIM Clear Blog
• Women of Internet Marketing Wednesdays Part 29, Search Marketing Gurus
• Joining Client Side SEM with Scott Smith aka Caveman and Aaron Wall aka SEObook, Stuntdubl

SEO & SEM

• Complex Site Hierarchies, Stone Temple
• How to use Google webmaster tools stats with Excel, johnmu.com
• MSN / Live Bot Does Not Follow 301 Redirects?, www.pdxtc.com
• Google sitelinks update, SEO Home
• Reputation Management and Your So-Called "Expert" Self, Cre8PC
• What Every Search Engine Optimization Company Should Know about Keyphrase Choice, Search Engine Guide

Social Media

• Digg The Candidates in 2008!, 10e20
• My Yahoo adds a Facebook module, snubs Mash, 360, and Kickstart, News.com
• Social Site Rankings (October, 2007), TechCrunch
• Facebook Competitor College Tonight "Goes Public" Raises $1.6M, TechCrunch

Video, Music & Image Search

• Nailing down the model for online video ads, News.com

Web Analytics

• Web Analytics Association 2008 Industry Survey, www.grokdotcom.com
• How to Measure Social Media Marketing, SEOptimise

Other Items

• Google Immortal, Google Blogoscoped
• How Much Money Do Bloggers Earn Blogging?, ProBlogger

Last 20 Hot Items From Sphinn, Our Social News Sharing Site:

• 16 Things To Do After Starting A New WordPress Blog
• 6 Easy Steps You Can Take to Stop Content Theft
• Uncover The Net No Longer Useful For Directory Submissions
• RealRank Won’t Work With Google PR
• Google Experimenting With Digg Style Voting On Search Results
• Shoemoney Interviewed On Work Life Balance
• Why Sphinn Matters So Much to Me
• Is User Generated Content a Threat to Journalism?
• Google Israel Forced To Hand Over Blogger’s IP Address To Court
• 7 Warning Signs That You’re Drunk on Your Own Words
• The 12 Steps Of SEO Anonymous
• Push Marketing V.S. Pull Marketing: Using Both Strategies to Promote Your Site
• Google Global Extension V2 Released
• Buy a PR 7 Link on Google.com: For Real
• The Currency of Social Networks
• There’s No Money In The Long Tail of the Blogosphere
• Google Announces “Google Body Search”
• Advanced Search Commands For Smart Webmasters
• It’s The (Other) Algorithm, Stupid! Understanding DiggRank
• Getting on the Sphinn Front Page: Basic and Advanced Concepts
• Are You a Social Media Idiot?