Google’s being sued for tricking advertisers into advertising on its content network – but the truth may be more damning than the lawsuit claims. Or is there a fatal mistake in the lawsuit filing?

Yahoo’s recent acquisition of IndexTools begs the question: do we need another free Web analytics tool? That depends on how much of IndexTools’ capabilities remain in Yahoo’s free offering.

Featured posts to the Search Engine Watch blog in the past week.

Search and online marketing are playing a significant role in energizing the youth vote. But the way each candidate is using social media is very different.

While online advertising will probably suffer if there is a recession, I predict search will be the last place from which marketers pull their ad dollars. Paid search is accountable, efficient, and built on a cost-controlled model, making it the most recession-proof medium in the ad world.

A recent survey of journalists found that many thought their publication will continue to exist in its current state. But is the survey sample skewing the results?

Found in the search marketing forums: AdWords Live on Yahoo; Can a Web Site Compete; Is PPC Irrelevant; and more.

Featured posts to the Search Engine Watch blog in the past week.

Contrary to popular belief, social marketing doesn’t have to be painted with visions of Big Brother. As a publisher, you cannot have a better segmentation methodology — in real time and without any bias — than the one that organically grows on your site.

Search marketers received more evidence this week that universal or blended search results are changing searcher behavior. If you’re not yet optimizing your news, image, or video content, you need to start.

Featured posts to the Search Engine Watch blog in the past week.

Found in the search marketing forums: SEO Standards; SEO at University; Good CMS for Easy SEO; and more.

Search has evolved from a way to address the fundamental challenges of finding a particular item, to become a method of finding the most relevant content out of a sea of possibilities. There are benefits for users, publishers, and advertisers to bring a social element to site search.

Instead of asking for technical changes that IT can’t or won’t make, teaching them what end result you’re after, and the challenges you face to get there, can help the SEO and IT teams work together toward a common goal.

In the glory days of advertising, consumers could be influenced by whatever words the advertisers fed them. Today, advertisers must learn the language of consumers, and shape their messages to meet their needs.

Featured posts to the Search Engine Watch blog in the past week.

Google has painted itself into a corner with its reliance on linking for its ranking algorithm. The lines between legitimate SEO, paid links, and Google bombs are becoming increasingly blurred.

Social networks have grown from small, local offline groups of people with common interests, to larger online groups spread across the world. Even the ease of communicating via the Internet can’t remove the limit on people’s time and attention to maintain multiple networks, though. What’s next?

Last week, comScore data showed that Google was sending more traffic to its own properties than it had been, leading some to worry if it was becoming more like a portal than a search engine. But that data appears to miss the larger picture, where Google is sending even more traffic to news sites than it does to Google News.

Featured posts to the Search Engine Watch blog in the past week, along with recent search-related headlines from around the Web.

For the past 10 years, most search engines have relied heavily on analyzing anchor text, links, and content to determine relevance. But recently, researchers at the top search engines have begun to look at other signals that might indicate search result relevance.

"Frankly, most SEOs are really smart and hard working; they’re just horribly misguided. They focus too much on the tricks to get people in the door and not enough on what people eat when they’re inside the restaurant."

Carr’s new book explores the future of computing and its implications for business and society. He’ll discuss some of those topics today during his opening keynote at SES New York.

Are search engine marketing jobs and budgets really recession-proof? And, if they are, will going to SES New York this week help traditional marketers get through the most serious recession since World War II?

Found in the search marketing forums: SES NY Party Thread; Reining in the Search Engines; Google Penalty; and more.