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 Search June 2008 Index Update
  Yahoo has warned us of an up and coming Yahoo Search index update. Priyank Garg & Sharad Verma of Yahoo Search said, Yahoo will "be rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days, but expect the update will be completed soon." The...
• Search Biz: Yahoo Morale Okay, Musical Chairs At Google, Microsoft, Marc Andreessen Joins Facebook Board & Tech Giants Fight "Patent Trolls"
  Lots of action for SearchBiz today; let's start with Yahoo. Fortune reprints a purported Yahoo employee email that is very upbeat and flies in the face of the gloom and doom analysis going on in the blogs. Meanwhile TechCrunch reports on another executive loss at the company, while Carl "proxy...
• Yahoo Officially Discontinued The Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool
  I reported at the Search Engine Roundtable that the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool no longer takes you to the tool, instead it redirects you to the Yahoo Search Marketing landing page. I emailed Yahoo for a statement, and they have confirmed that they have decommissioned the tool. There are tools...
• Google Blocks Anti-Obama Blogs Flagged Incorrectly As Spam
  My day started reading about how Google was reportedly censoring anti-Barack Obama blogs by shutting them down on Google-owned Blogger. I quickly did some debunking in a comment on our Sphinn site -- but still, Google probably needs to do more to ensure its Blogger spam reporting tools aren't...
• Matt Cutts On SEO Tips & Fighting Spam
  Google's Matt Cutts has recently provided some advice on SEO and explained how Google combats spam. Matt recently was interviewed by Jefferson Graham of USA Today. The article was named Google's Cutts: Good directions drive traffic to your website. The article covers five topics of SEO including keyword phrases, title...
• Competitors Taking Action Against Competitors For Search Ad Trademark Infringement
  Search ads trigger trademark lawsuit from rival from News.com reports on another search ad trademark lawsuit. This one differs in that the plaintiff is not suing a search engine, but rather suing his competitor. NameSafe sued LifeLock for allegedly allowing one of their resellers to show search ads with NameSafe's...
• Google Pushing Into TV, Original Content Distribution
  One could liken Google to a house that keeps expanding, with new room additions every few months. Google's house is already the largest on the block and it seems to keep getting bigger. Two related moves represent further expansion. The first is the announcement last week of the Google Media...
• Don't Let Machines Write Your Keyword Lists
  As anyone who has seen the Terminator or Matrix movies can attest, if machines rule the world humans are in deep trouble. Similarly, if you allow machines to control the PPC keyword creation process you are guaranteed to both leave opportunity on the table and flush money down the...

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• Export Data from Google's Services, Google Operating System

Business Issues

• Citigroup adds Google, Time Warner to top picks live, Reuters

Local, Maps & Mobile

• The New Google Mobile Community, Official Google Mobile Blog
• Local and the Future of Ad Serving, Screenwerk
• Where is a map to mapping maps?, San Francisco Chronicle

Link Building

• Is That Directory Worth Submitting To?, The Link Spiel
• Buy or Sell Nofollow'd Contextual Link Ads, The SEO Scoop
• Top Ten Link Building Strategies, Search Marketing Sage

Paid Search & Contextual

• Yahoo and Rich Media Ads, SEOish
• Use Google Ad Manager To Set Minimum AdSense eCPM, Search Engine Roundtable

Searching

• Introducing our Program Manager interns for the summer, Live QnA
• Hakia Semantic Search Goes Mobile With Berggi, altsearchengines.com
• Google Search Comes to Netvibes, mashable.com

SEM Industry

• Neutered SEOs, PPC, Google Sheep, & Paid Links Gone Underground, AIM Clear Blog
• PPC Blog - SEO Book's New Sister Site, SEO Book
• An Open Letter to SEO Bloggers: Back up Your Statements!, SEO Refugee

SEO & SEM

• Beyond the Top 10 SEO Factors, Scott Hendison
• Google "Do you mean" Results Baffling, www.weboptimist.com
• Keyword Research : Where to Start?, Search Engine Journal
• SEO Effectiveness: Spend Your Time Wisely, Search Engine Journal
• Is there a Minimum Number of Pages Required for Decent Organic Rankings?, Search Engine Roundtable
• Margae vs. Clear Link: The Dangers of Doing SEO By Commission and Not Having Good Contract Discipline, SEOmoz
• Moving to a U.S Hosted Server: Will it Impact Country Specific SEO?, Search Engine Roundtable
• 5 Common Crawlability Mistakes That Kill Your SEO Success, Small Business SEM

Social Media

• Google Talk As a Social Network, Google Operating System
• State of the Twitter, June 2008, Scripting News
• Recommendation Engine rolling out this week!, Digg the Blog
• Twitter Conversations Come To A Screaming Halt; Users Simply Move To Friendfeed, TechCrunch
• Replies Are Back, Improvements Continue, Twitter Blog
• What Does 50 Sphinns Get You? , Web Analytics World Blog
• Plurk Brings Micro Forums, Like Twitter Brought Micro Blogging, Search Engine Roundtable
• Plurk versus Twitter: They're Not the Same, and Here's Why, Techipedia
• SEO vs SMO - Traffic Quality Put To The Test, The SEO Scoop

Video, Music & Image Search

• Real purpose of YouTube annotations gets unnoticed as people dive into "birth of Long-Form video" discussions, Reactive Software Blog
• As New Car Sales Slide, Audience for Automotive Video Online Booms - ClickZ, ClickZ

Web Analytics

• Let's Talk Analytics, Conversions, Cloaking, and More, WebProNews
• Measuring Media & Downloads From Your Site Using adCenter Analytics, www.adcentercommunity.com
• A Year In Web Analytics - 10 Things I Have Learned - adCenter Analytics, adcentercommunity.com

Other Items

• Google Euro Championship Doodle, Google Blogoscoped
• Video Recap of Weekly Search Buzz :: June 29, 2008, Search Engine Roundtable

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

• Plurk versus Twitter: They're Not the Same, and Here's Why
• SEO vs SMO - Traffic Quality Put To The Test
• Research: Getting to the Roots of Your Site Visitor
• Matt Cutts is using your data to catch Spam
• My Thoughts On Ask.com & Core Search
• Sorry, Ask.com -- I Still Don't Think You're Focused On Core Search
• 10 Minute Guide to Plurk - Cliques - The Great Idea with the Awful Name
• 50 Niche Search Engines That Will Make Your Everyday Life Easier
• How to Play the Odds Game and Win With Digg
• Shine A Light - How to explain link-theory to a layman
• Small Business Link Building: Part A - Analysing Opportunities
• You’re Not Just a Writer, You’re the Editor-in-Chief.
• An Email Marketing Tip Sheet
• My Avatar - Your Window to Me
• Trulia Caught Cloaking Red Handed
• Cut Out The Middle Man: Direct Blog Ad Sales - Private Ad Sales
• Digg Cleans Up Navigation, Candidates, and Adds Olympics
• An Open Letter to SEO Bloggers: Back up Your Statements!

Yahoo has warned us of an up and coming Yahoo Search index update. Priyank Garg & Sharad Verma of Yahoo Search said, Yahoo will "be rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days, but expect the update will be completed soon."

The last Yahoo update was just about a month ago and Yahoo typically conducts updates monthly. I have not seen any discussion on fluctuations at Yahoo Search within the forums yet. Yahoo does explain we may see "some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index" during this update.

Yahoo has warned us of an up and coming Yahoo Search index update. Priyank Garg & Sharad Verma of Yahoo Search said, Yahoo will "be rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days, but expect the update will be completed soon."

The last Yahoo update was just about a month ago and Yahoo typically conducts updates monthly. I have not seen any discussion on fluctuations at Yahoo Search within the forums yet. Yahoo does explain we may see "some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index" during this update.

Lots of action for SearchBiz today; let's start with Yahoo. Fortune reprints a purported Yahoo employee email that is very upbeat and flies in the face of the gloom and doom analysis going on in the blogs. Meanwhile TechCrunch reports on another executive loss at the company, while Carl "proxy fight" Icahn uses his blog to officially say nothing about Yahoo and upcoming fight for control of the Yahoo board.

Click to continue reading...

I reported at the Search Engine Roundtable that the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool no longer takes you to the tool, instead it redirects you to the Yahoo Search Marketing landing page. I emailed Yahoo for a statement, and they have confirmed that they have decommissioned the tool.

There are tools you can use within the Yahoo Search Marketing console that you can use instead, but it requires that you login. The Overture tool has been plagued with issues for a long time. Overture's tool, to me, is a historic SEM tool that will forever be remembered amongst SEMs - it is a bit sad to me to see it go. There are many good alternatives, many much better then the Overture tool, for more see our Search Marketing: Search Term Research category.

Last week I asked a question about local advertising and used the Reno Rodeo as an example. Here the event has come and gone and I literally knew nothing about it.

While perusing through the Reno Rodeo website I noticed a number of issues, some little, some big, but things that they can fix that can help them build a better web experience. I thought I’d take that and turn it into a post that will allow all my readers to lean from a real-life example.

Step 1: Make ticket buying easy(ier)

It took me a bit to find it, but you can actually buy tickets online. You wouldn’t know it, though, with the header telling me to call an 800 number to purchase tickets. This image should be linked either to the tickets page on the site or to tickets.com where tickets are actually purchased.

In the top row header there is a “tickets” link, but when I mouse over there is a bit of confusion with the drop down. Do I click the main button or the “ticket sales” button? It doesn’t really matter as the information on both pages is 95% identical (duplicate content alert!). Getting rid of that unnecessary drop down will help.

Clicking either of the ticket links above I am again offered the 800 number or told I can purchase online. But how? I have to read through that first paragraph to know that I can go to tickets.com, which is actually linked, but not linked to the Reno Rodeo ticket purchase page.

Scratch that, after several passes I see that the image tells me to “click here,” which leads to the tickets.com Reno Rodeo ticket page. This shows the value in having both visual (image) calls to action along with textual calls to action. I missed the visual one all together looking for the non-existent textual link.

I did find another way to order tickets easily. Go to the contact us link at the top which has a nice “Click here” for those of us who want to purchase online. That link takes you to the actual tickets.com Reno Rodeo tickets page as well.

Step 2: Broadcast your event dates better

Event websites like this need to broadcast the date of their events in the header. Right now you have to look halfway down the page, below the Reno Rodeo News, to find the dates of the event. Put that at the top. Throw it in the logo image below the 800 number. Make it bold, loud and obvious!

Step 3: Fix your security errors

Not everybody types in the “www.” in the address bar. Normally it’s not a problem but here it is:

This is easily fixed by implementing a redirect from renorodeo.com to www.renorodeo.com

Errors like this can stop a lot of traffic from moving forward. It’s smart to check your site on multiple machines and browsers to make sure you don’t get this, or any other visitor stopping errors.

Step 4: Organize your navigation

If you look closely you can see that the navigation is organized alphabetically. Now that’s a great way to organize your Blu-ray discs, but not the best for site navigation. What they need to do here is segment their navigation. Have tasks such as Home, Parking, Getting here, etc under a common navigational header, separate from video, cattle drive, team 355 and the like. I’d have to spend more time than I’m willing right now to figure out just how to do this right, but let’s just say that it’s all wrong.

Find ways to segment your navigation into scannable chunks. Create categories based on how users are likely to be looking for specific groups of information. This makes everything easier to find and navigate to.

Step 5: Move your news more accessible

There are several problems with the “Rodeo News” that is at the top of the home page. First of all, it’s location is all wrong. The news box pushes the other important content down too far on the page. I say they should move this box off to the side, even outside the main content area completely. By doing that they can then have the news available on every page, not just the home page.

Next, I want to know how to get to news older than the few entries they have listed here. I don’t see any links to “more news”, but I assume that they’ve been posting news since the beginning of the event. Jut give me a place to go to catch up on what I missed.

Finally, where is the RSS feed? This is 2008, anything “news” has to have a feed. This lets your true customers keep up on the goings on without having to revisit the site several times a day.

I could go on, but think this is quite enough to make a pretty significant improvement in web usability. If Reno Rodeo implements these few items I’m sure they’ll see their web satisfaction go up, if not selling additional tickets as well.

My day started reading about how Google was reportedly censoring anti-Barack Obama blogs by shutting them down on Google-owned Blogger. I quickly did some debunking in a comment on our Sphinn site -- but still, Google probably needs to do more to ensure its Blogger spam reporting tools aren't being abused -- especially given how it says these "can't be manipulated by angry mobs." Right now, it looks like they can.

Click to continue reading...

Kevin Kelly makes the point, riffing on Chris's ideas about the "end of theory."

Kevin Kelly makes the point, riffing on Chris's ideas about the "end of theory."

MediaWeek reports:

After taking several days to digest the news, the digital media world has reached the conclusion that the launch of Google’s new media planning product isn’t likely to bring upheaval to the Web metrics business. And it probably doesn’t represent the feared first step towards total advertising—and ultimately world—domination by the search giant either.....

“They need to add so many things, it’s not even a consideration at this point,” said David Smith, CEO, Mediasmith, who pointed out that Ad Planner lacks deep demographic data and a reach/frequency function. “It’s absolutely not ready for prime time.”

True for now, but don't get comfy thinking that version 1 of this product is going to be the last version...knowing David, I bet he's watching this pretty closely.