SearchCap: The Day In Search, November 29, 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:

• AdWords Unveils New Top-Of-Page Bidding Options

  Google introduced a report in July that let AdWords advertisers compare performance between top-of-page ads and those appearing on the side (and now the bottom) of the page. Then it began letting advertisers know how high they have to bid to appear at the top. Now, there are a couple more ways to capitalize on […]
• Facebook Downplays Significance Of FTC Privacy Settlement

  Facebook and the US Federal Trade Commission announced their formal privacy settlement today. Facebook and the federal agency each put their spin on it, with Facebook saying it was very similar to “agreements” previously reached with Google and Twitter: Recently, the US Federal Trade Commission established agreements with Google and Twitter that are helping to […]

• Free and Paid Tactics for Google+, Facebook and Twitter – SMX Social Media Marketing Starts Next Monday! December 5-6 in Scottsdale, AZ

  Drive new traffic to your site. Secure more conversions. Retain existing customers. Manage your company’s reputation and customer service. Social media networks provide the means; you need to master the platform. SMX Social Media Marketing is a two-day, tactic-rich conference where you’ll be immersed in social media marketing of all types. Check out the full […]

• Cadbury’s Brin & Page Google +1 Chocolate Bars

  Cadbury posted on their Google + page a picture of their latest milk chocolate bars named “Dairy Milk+ Bars.” The Milk+ bars come in two flavors, Sergey Brin & Larry Page – i.e. the co-founders of Google. As part of a social media experiment, Cadbury posted this on their Google + page, saying: Remember our […]

• Google Maps The Great Indoors (Android Only)

  Google is bringing the blue dot indoors. Google Maps for Android 6.0 is going to start showing interior maps of airports, select malls and retail stores in the US and Japan. In Japan transit stations are also mapped. The floor plan data has been obtained from all the participating entities, which Google’s Steve Lee says […]

• How To Prioritize Keywords For Optimization Based On Organic Competition

  Previously in Organic Keywords: The First Step In Search Engine Optimization, I covered how to use Google Analytics to choose the organic keyword phrases to focus on first in your optimization efforts: those keywords already contributing to the business goals. We then looked at how to use Google analytics to help “map” those keywords to existing […]

• Infographic: It’s Quite A Job To Get Hired By Google

  Google’s hiring process is pretty infamous. Multiple interviews. Sign-off at the very top. And those crazy interview questions! It’s a wonder that anyone gets a job. The folks at Jobvine have put together an infographic illustrating the hiring process at Google, along with some interesting employment stats about the company, including salaries and growth in employees, […]

• Manual Link Building Is Hard, But There Are No Shortcuts To Value

  Link building is hard work. Allow me to clarify that: Building legitimate links that have genuine value in search is hard work. Some folks don’t have patience for that hard work, so they turn to alternative means to acquire links. Sometimes they simply do ineffective work. Sometimes they seek links from junk sites that accept […]

• International SEM: Important Lessons In Understanding The True Nature Of Keywords

  Mindboggling. That’s the only word I can use to describe the fact that still today there are agencies and professionals who think that the right approach to generating keywords for international search marketing campaigns is to translate them. I have wasted so much of my time on this planet saying “Do Not Translate Your Keywords” […]

• Google Acknowledges Bug in AdWords Keyword Tool

  Observant users of Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool have noticed something odd in recent days — when you do an exact match search on certain terms, the volume reported is zero. Surely someone has been searching on terms like wine, iPod, and dogs. Indeed, a Google spokesperson confirms that it’s a bug. “We’re aware of a […]

Search News From Around The Web:

Business Issues

• Facebook: Worth $100 billion after IPO?, ZDNet
• Free Software activists to take on Google with new free search engine, ITworld

Local, Maps & Mobile

• Google Offers Now Live in Columbus, OH, Google Commerce
• Nielsen: iPhone & Android own 71% of U.S. smartphone market, Fortune Tech

Link Building

• 18 Tools to Speed Up Link Building, Justin Briggs
• Extreme Link Prospecting With SEOQuake, Kaiserthesage
• 2nd November Index Update: Our Broadest Index Yet, and New PA/DA Scores are Live, SEOmoz
• Your Ultimate Link Wish List, Search Engine Watch

Searching

• British Library newspaper archive puts 300 years of history online, Telegraph
• Working with Permutations in Wolfram|Alpha, Wolfram|Alpha Blog

SEM Industry

• SEO Salaries – Top Cities, Jobs and Salary Ranges for SEO professionals, onwardsearch.com

SEO & SEM

• How to Hire Your SEO Partner, Techipedia
• How To Monetize PDFs In Google Search Results, Search Engine Roundtable
• HTML Entities In Google Anchor Sitelinks, Search Engine Roundtable
• Search Engine Optimization Case Study: How I Drive Free Organic Traffic To My Coupon Blog Daily, Daily SEO Tip
• Search Engine Optimization for Images, Search Marketing Sage
• Seven things to do at the weekend, to help your SEO, distilled
• Should I spend more time on improving my content or on fighting scrapers?, YouTube

Social Media

• Facebook Targeting IPO For Between April and June 2012, Wall Street Journal
• Building The Implicit Social Graph, SEOmoz
• Most Shared Articles on Facebook in 2011, facebook.com
• Twitter Adds Team Who Created Privacy Tools for Activists, Wall Street Journal

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

• Extreme Link Prospecting With SEOQuake – Link prospecting is definitely one of the most critical parts of targeted link building, as this is the process that initiates your campaign’s goals, specifically in acquiring valuable links from high quality and relevant websites.
• How Images Can Boost Your Conversion Rate – People hardly buy anything without seeing it. Usually they also want to touch it, hold it and take it for a spin. You really can’t do those things online (unless it’s web based software). So to compensate for all of that, you need to work twice as hard to make your products come alive via excellent photography and graphics.
• Red-Headed SEO Stranger: My Interview With Matthew Brown – Where I get Matt to open up on the relationship between SEO and PPC.
• 18 Tools to Speed Up Link Building – Link building is full of time consuming, repetitive tasks. I’ve written once before about humanistic scaling, which works great as a strategic approach to link building, but ultimately, there will always be a degree of heavy lifting that requires someone to sit down and work through a bunch of repetitive tasks.
• Are You Trusted by Google? – Are you a robot? A spammer? A sock puppet? A trusted author and content developer? A trusted agent in the eyes of Google?
• My 10 years of blogging: Reflections, Lessons & Some Stats Too – Ten years is a long time. Sometimes it is so long that one forgets a lot more than one remembers — like the fact that it I have been blogging for a decade. I would have totally forgotten about the amount of time that has passed, had it not been for (what else) a blog post from Fred Wilson, one of the more engaging and rigorous bloggers on the web. It just so happens he is a venture capitalist, but he would be a great blogger without the VC tag as well.