SearchCap: The Day In Search, October 25, 2010

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

From Search Engine Land:

• Schmidt’s “Just Move” Joke About Google Street View & How It Went Missing

  Don’t like Google Street View taking pictures of your house? “Just move,” joked Google CEO Eric Schmidt, in a CNN interview on Friday. A controversial joke, no doubt — one made even more controversial for later seeming to disappear from the interview. Don’t blame Google, the company says. It didn’t ask for the quote to […]

• Hot At Sphinn: SEO Value Of No-Follow Links, PEST & SLEPT Analysis, Linkbait’s Value & More

  Sphinn’s new “Discussion of the Week” was a big hit last week. We asked, Do you think no-follow links are worth more than Google says?, and that discussion received the most comments (25), tweets (42), and Facebook likes (5) of all the stories published last week on Sphinn.
  It also produced our favorite comment of […]

• Google Boost Ads: Automated AdWords For Small Businesses

  Several years ago Google was working on a radically simplified approach to AdWords called “Simple Ads.” It was supposed to totally automate AdWords creation and campaign management for small businesses. Google worked on that product for a long time and didn’t seem to be able to create a product it was satisfied with.
  In the interim […]

• Saturday Night Live: Yahoo & AOL Merger Like Two Seniors Dating At A Nursing Home

  A couple weeks ago, there were some rumors that AOL may buy Yahoo. This past week’s Saturday Night Live’s news brief skit with John Mulaney started off talking about that news bit.
  John Mulaney said, and here is the transcript:
  First up in the world of technology.
  I heard this week that AOL might […]

• Google Suggestions Get Localized For Countries Around The World, News Alerts Improved

  The Google Blog announced a few new features for Google search this week. First, they confirmed the realtime counter we reported earlier last week. Second, local search suggestions are now for cities around the world, not just in the US. Finally, Google Alerts for news based alerts is now improved.
  In April 2010, Google […]

• Google Opens Retail Google Schwag Store

  Louis Gray reports that Google has opened up a physical retail store, to compliment their online store.
  The physical store is located on the Google Campus at 2000 Charleston Road building, known as the 2000 Alza building. The building houses the Google Buzz team and “consumer-facing products” according to Gray. When Gray […]

• Time To Rally For An Advertiser’s Bill of Rights

  Search advertising has resembled the wild west for too long. Advertisers have been misled, mistreated and overcharged; the standards of service must improve lest all firms—good, bad and indifferent—be tarred with the same brush. Herewith, a modest proposal for a bill of rights for advertisers.

• Google Facing Privacy Fines In UK, Must Mark Street View Cars In Italy

  In Italy the country’s privacy authorities are asking Google to more clearly mark Street View cars, as well as publicize their itineraries. According to Reuters:
  Under the regulator’s decision, Google has to publish three days in advance on its website, in local newspapers and on radio in which locality, including which area of a […]

• TV, Meet Search: Integrating Television & Paid Search For Maximum Results

  Effectively coordinating your TV commercials with paid search marketing programs could be the key to driving measurable results and overall improvement in your marketing programs across channels.

• Why You Need To Track On-The-Phone Conversions

  If you’re in a service-based business, chances are that your SEM campaign generates phone calls. Hopefully, you’re taking advantage of call tracking to tell you how many phone calls your campaigns generate, and using that data to help you evaluate the success of your campaigns. That’s a great start, but you’re still missing a […]

• Go For Bigger Mobile Budgets For The Holidays Now!

  The 2010 mobile holiday season is now just 30 days out. In last month’s column, I outlined dozens of mobile web page optimization best practices to improve sales and generally avoid the “you suck” lump of stocking coal this season. To underscore the opportunity and concern, Internet Retailer announced last week at the Mobile […]

• Yahoo Site Explorer: What’s The Status Of the Link Data?

  Earlier this week, site owners noticed that substantial Yahoo Site Explorer link data seemed to be missing. A glitch? Gone for good? The first signs of integration into Bing webmaster tools? I talked to Yahoo and got at least some initial answers. Many site owners regularly use Site Explorer for information on external links to […]

• Is Google Broken? Sites Big & Small Seeing Indexing Problems

  No one seems to be immune from a Google indexing problem that has many site owners baffled. Blogs and websites, big and small, aren’t being indexed as quickly as they normally are — if they’re being indexed at all.
  CNN.com, with its PageRank score of 10, is typically crawled frequently and deeply by Googlebot. But the […]

• Google Releases Chrome Extension To Encourage Spam Reporting

  Google has released a Chrome browser extension that simplifies and encourages spam reporting. Earlier today, Matt Cutts, Google’s web spam chief, tweeted about the Google Webspam Report extension.

  The extension adds a “Report spam” link (or button) in four places:

  under each listing in Google’s search results pages (seen above)
  your Google search history
  your Chrome browser history
  next […]

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• Was The Google German Testing Blog Hacked?, Search Engine Roundtable
• Your stats, right away, AdSense for Feeds

Business Issues

• Meet Google’s New Search Boss: Udi Manber, Business Insider
• MySpace, Apps Leak User Data, Wall Street Journal
• Twitter Employees Get Google’s 20% Time… For The Entire Next Week, TechCrunch
• Why You Should Still Buy Google, Wall Street Journal
• Google leads charge to dismiss Paul Allen’s ‘scattershot’ lawsuit, techflash.com
• Larry Page’s Business Card, Google Operating System
• Google Goes After YouTubeSocial For Trademark Infringement, TechCrunch
• Google Sets New Internet Traffic Record, Arbor Networks Security

Local, Maps & Mobile

• Google bets on location-based mobile coupons as linchpin for success, Mobile Marketer
• Advertisers can now extend Interactive Video and Interactive Interstitial campaigns to Android with our new Android SDK for publishers, Google Mobile Ads Blog

Link Building

• Link Baiting and Viral Marketing with Venn Diagrams, blueglass.com

Paid Search & Contextual

• 10 Inappropriately Placed Google Ads, Search Engine People
• ‘Tis the season for placement targeting: Display advertising, Inside AdSense

Searching

• Weekly Yahoo! Search Trends – October 22, 2010, Yodel Anecdotal
• Google Instant – Oops, Data Mining

SEM Industry

• 10 Halloween Costumes for SEOs, Vertical Measures

SEO & SEM

• Google AdWords Reporting: An Update Since Summer Changes, PPC Hero
• What Do You Expect Your SEO Expert to Know?, Search Engine Guide
• 4 Tools to Find Related Keyword Phrases for Varied Anchor Text, Search Engine Journal
• Be cautious when using SEO plugins, Vertical Leap Blog
• Can I tell Google not to display the date in my site’s snippets?, YouTube
• Google Says "Don’t Be Afraid" Of Duplicate Content, Search Engine Roundtable
• How To Identify & Solve URL Canonicalization Issues, Vertical Measures
• How To: Allow Google to Crawl your AJAX Content, SEOmoz
• Organic Search Listings That Drive Clicks, Search Engine Watch
• SEO and Assumptions behind Web Searches, SEO By The Sea
• When Google Rewrites Your Title Tags, Search Engine Roundtable
• Will the visual design of your pages help your SEO?, Search Engine Guide
• YSM/adCenter Feature Comparison #6: Match Types and Negative Keywords, Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog

Social Media

• A World of Tweets, Twitter Blog
• Did Facebook Just Move to Kill Off Orkut?, gigaom.com
• Twitter’s “Similar to You” could outdo “Who to Follow” for suggestions, thenextweb.com
• Asking The Right Questions to Avoid Social Disaster, outspokenmedia.com
• Digg To Layoff 37% Of Staff, Product Refocus Imminent, TechCrunch

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

• Social Marketing: From Offline to Universal – In this post is described what Social Marketing (not Media!) is and how you can use the principles for gaining benefits in the search engines by making full use of the Universal Search potential.
• Google on Manipulating Search for ORM – Does Google condone creating new content to hide negative material? Rhea Drysdale highlights discussions on a couple of SEO forums and a recent broadcast on NPR and weighs in with an opinion of her own.