SearchCap: The Day In Search, November 3, 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 Search Algorithm Change For Freshness To Impact 35% Of Searches; Twitter Firehose Remains Off

  Google announced they are rolling out a new search algorithm change that helps make the search results “fresher.” The big news here is that besides for the results being fresher, the results will change for about 35% of all searches. Caffeine Was Infrastructure, This Is Algorithmic Fresher results can make for more relevant results, which […]

• VIDEO: Google’s “Do A Barrel Roll” Search Is Latest Easter Egg

  If you have vertigo, be careful with this one: Google’s latest easter egg search result comes in the form of a nifty, spin-tastic search results page for the query do a barrel roll. When you do that search, Google listens and make the search results page do a barrel roll. Here’s a video that we’ve […]

• Bing Webmaster Tools Expand Crawl Details, Offers URL Normalization Tips & More

  Duane Forrester announced on the Bing Search blog a major upgrade to Bing Webmaster Tools. He said this is their biggest update since the Honey Badger update from June. The key updates and changes include: Expanded Crawl Details: This includes showing inbound links for any URL including 300, 400 & 500 codes. Plus URLs listed […]

• SMX West 2012 Registration Open – Best Rates Available Now, Save $400

  Search Marketing Expo – SMX West returns to Silicon Valley for its fifth year in February 2012! Register now to take advantage of the lowest-available Super Early Bird rates. The SMX West conference program will run February 28 thru March 1; the expo hall will be open February 28-29. Conference will be held at McEnery […]

• Google Offers Goes National, Still Makes Me Feel Excluded

  Google Offers hasn’t rolled out yet to your city in the US? Google’s solution is its first “national” offer that came out today, $25 to spend at REI for $15. But as a person in a non-Google Offers city, I found the promotion just alienated me even more. Offers & The OC I live in Newport Beach, […]

• Google+ Gets YouTube Integration & Official Chrome Extension

  Today Google announced the integration of two of their most popular products, YouTube and Chrome, into Google+. These enhancements make sharing videos on YouTube easier and brings the +1 button and Google+ notifications to the rest of the web for Chrome users. Google+ YouTube Integration Users have always been able to share YouTube videos on Google+, […]

• The Clickthrough Rate Equation In Organic Search, Part Two

  In last month’s post, I talked about how improving organic clickthrough rate multiplies the effectiveness of the other work that goes into optimizing a website for search, such as keyword research, SEO, and usability. Most of these ways of increasing clickthrough rate are directly in our control by tweaking the on-page code. I ended by covering […]

• Smartphones Now Over 50 Percent For Under 44 Crowd

  Nielsen has released new smartphone data this morning reflecting overall US smartphone penetration. The number is 43 percent, unchanged from October but up several points from several months ago. (comSore’s official smartphone penetration number is 36 percent.). Nielsen says that 43 percent of US smartphone owners have an Android handsets compared to 28 percent who […]

• Study: Bing More “Biased” Than Google; Google Not Behaving Anti-Competitively

  Does Google favor its own sites in search results, as many critics have claimed? Not necessarily. New research suggests claims that Google is “biased” are overblown, and that Google’s primary competitor, Microsoft’s Bing, may actually be serving Microsoft-related results “far more” often than Google links to its own services in search results. In an analysis […]

• How To Leverage Structured Markup To Create E-Commerce Web Portals

  I’m sure most of you are familiar with the definition of a Web portal. Wikipedia defines it as a point of access to the Web with information from diverse sources represented in a unified way. Standard Web portals are those we are all familiar with, such as Google, Bing or Yahoo; however, there are also […]

• Google Officially Rolls Out Ads At The Bottom Of Search Results

  We’ve been seeing tests for months, and this week Google officially announced it would begin serving AdWords at the bottom of search engine results pages on Google.com. Interestingly, the company says that, in tests, the ads at the bottom performed better than those on the side of the page. Google says ads at the bottom […]

• Journalists Get Their Profiles Featured In Google News … Their Google+ Profiles, That Is

  Google News will soon start highlighting journalists’ profiles in Google News. But rather than highlighting the profiles from their primary website/writing venue, Google will be highlighting their Google+ profiles. In a blog post today, Google showed an example of how the profiles will be featured within Google News. The journalist has to first have a […]

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• General Motors to Use Google Apps, Wall Street Journal

Business Issues

• Google gets second shot at federal cloud contract, faces uphill fight, Ars Technica
• Is Google Too Big To Fail?, SEO Book
• Amazingly, AOL still has 3.5 million dialup subscribers, SplatF

Local, Maps & Mobile

• Google Maps Wants Feedback From New Yorkers, Search Engine Roundtable
• Share biking and walking directions with Custom Maps, Google LatLong

Link Building

• 6 Great Examples of Halloween Linkbuilding (and Takeaways for Your Website), hoodwebmanagement.com

Paid Search & Contextual

• Updates on the AdSense mobile interface and low bandwidth version, Inside AdSense

Searching

• Bing Making Search Less Lonely, Bing Search Blog

SEO & SEM

• Upcoming change in the “Slot” field for reports, AdWords API Blog
• If I get links to a URL with and without a trailing slash, will my PageRank be split?, YouTube
• Introducing adCenter’s Import Campaigns feature: Bringing Added Choice and Flexibility to A Desktop Near You, adCenter Blog
• Is A New Version Of The AdWords Interface Coming?, periscopix.co.uk
• Negative Keywords in Google AdWords – 4 Tips For Improving Your Targeting This Holiday Season, Search Engine People
• Why Does Great Content Fail?, SEOmoz
• Your home page is not a dumping ground, SEO Copywriting

Social Media

• Google+ is not a social network, but it’s not a graveyard, either, VentureBeat
• One in five willing to make Facebook friends with complete strangers, Ars Technica
• The Facebook Marketing Ecosystem, Rimm Kaufman

Video, Music & Image Search

• A New App For iOS: Flow Powered by Amazon (Augmented Reality/Image Recognition), infodocket.com
• Introducing Plex for Google TV, Darrin’s Blog
• YouTube Tests a New Interface, Google Operating System
• YouTube Using Wrong Thumbnail Images On Videos, Search Engine Roundtable

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

• Discussion: Google vs. Bing Webmaster Tools – Which is better? What's missing? – Both Google and Bing offer a Webmaster Tools product with a variety of things that site owners can use to understand how each search engine interacts with their website(s). In our "Discussion of the Week," we want to know: Which one you think offers the better toolset for site owners? Which one do you use more often? And what features are missing from either or both? The floor is open!
• 10 reasons why your link requests are failing – One of the most common difficulties in link building is getting a response from link requests. Wordtracker's Ken McGaffin gives 10 reasons why you might not be getting answers and how to fix each problem.
• Online Database of Social Media Policies – 175 policies in this database  – Great references info.
• Implementing SEO in a Development Environment – Justin Briggs covers implementing SEO in a development environment.
• Google Places Gets A New SERP And Yelp Continues To Win – Yes we all know by now that Google Places has a new look for their SERPs (one which I really dig by the way) but I want to talk about who I still think comes out the winner in all this – Yelp.
• Dear internet marketers: Stop building your careers on a single commoditized skill – Fantastic advice for internet marketers that are focused on just one specific skill set.
• Location Targeting Gets a Makeover – Nice improvements to the location targeting UI in the Google AdWords campaing settings.
• Proof That Google’s Secure Search Now Affects More Users – Did Google just take the next big step in rolling out secure search? It certainly looks that way.
  Since our team went through the process last week to exclude all ”(not provided)” traffic from SEER’s Search profiles, the change was obvious this morning. Looking at individual sites, we quickly saw the trend of ”(not provided)” traffic increasing. Upon further analysis…
• From Social Commerce to Syndicated Commerce – Brian provides some fascinating perspective and plenty of hard data to support his point of view. A must read.