SearchCap: The Day In Search, September 1, 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: Google Maps “Sponsored Map Icons” Test Comes To U.S. Google Maps is now testing “sponsored map icons” in the United States. This was first tested back in March in the Australian […]

Chat with SearchBot

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 Maps “Sponsored Map Icons” Test Comes To U.S.

    Google Maps is now testing “sponsored map icons” in the United States. This was first tested back in March in the Australian version of Google Maps. The sponsored map icons are basically company logo enhanced points of interest icons.
    For example, instead of seeing a generic ATM machine icon on Google Maps, […]

  • Case Study: Which Online Grocer Has The Best Conversion Process

    Some of you may remember my debut Search Engine Land post which looked at the process for buying an iPhone 4 on various UK retailers. The article went down quite well so I’d like to repeat this process for another set of websites to see how they convert visitors into buyers.
    This time I’ve chosen […]

  • How To Identify Industry Specific & Mainstream Media On Twitter

    Need authority links? Twitter is one of the best ways I’ve found to get your site (or yourself as the case may be) on the radar of the journalists who decide what topics and websites are discussed (and linked to) in mainstream media.
    Interacting with the folks who report on your chosen industry on Twitter – […]

  • Google Search Now Indexes & Crawls SVG Files

    The Google Webmaster Help blog announced they are now indexing SVG files and documents. SVG is a royalty-free graphics format typically used on the web for fancy font usage.
    Google said:
    We index SVG content whether it is in a standalone file or embedded directly in HTML. The web is big, so it may take some […]

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

Business Issues

Local, Maps & Mobile

Link Building

Paid Search & Contextual

Searching

SEM Industry

SEO & SEM

Social Media

Video, Music & Image Search

Web Analytics

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

  • Sphinn Says Goodbye To Voting – Within a week or two, the voting model will end at Sphinn. Stories can still be submitted, but editors will consider those in addition to others they find. Why? Rather than build community, voting — an activity which is also in decline — seems to foster an anti-community "who's winning" atmosphere.
  • Case Study: Google Webmaster Tools for Diagnostics – Google Webmaster Tools gets a bit of slack because you are “giving Google too much information” I say take off your tinfoil hats, there is method behind the madness and GWT can be an invaluable tool for crawling diagnostics – as this post proves.
  • The Definitive Guide to Image Search Optimisation – Picking up the gauntlet thrown down by Bill Slawski, here's my guide to optimising your images for ranking in Google Image Search. From filenames to picture dimensions, it's all relevant.
  • How Buying Links Cost A Flower Vendor $4 Million In Google Traffic – Debate whether Google should penalize over paid links all you want. The bottom line remains that Google DOES penalize, when it finds them, and when it wants. And in this case, an online flower shop's SEO firm bought links for them. Penality ensued, and it figures it lost $4 million in sales from 2008-2009. Good news is the lesson taught them to build up other marketing channels. Better news would have been to keep the Google traffic and diversify, as well.

About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.

Get the must-read newsletter for search marketers.