In the past, a search for starwars kid, as one example, returned a video with a plus sign that said “watch video.” For at least a few weeks now, those video results, even YouTube videos, no longer have that plus box - which strips the ability to watch videos directly in the Google search results.

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But it’s a mistake to paint all real estate professionals with such broad strokes. There’s a new wave of real estate agents and agencies that are adopting the latest online (and offline) marketing techniques to sell themselves to local home buyers and sellers. Blogging and social media marketing are the new tools of the trade for creative real estate agents. This month’s small business marketing success story is one of those agents.

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From Search Engine Land:

• 
  SMX Advanced ‘08 - Day Two Recap
  Day two of SMX Advanced is now over. The Give it Up session was truly awesome, but those notes can not be posted until July 3rd, so stay tuned for that. Here are the sessions recaps:…
• 
  Google Sued For “Fraudulent Mobile Subscription Services”
  Eric Goldman has posted about yet another lawsuit against Google, this time the plaintiffs were allegedly wronged in a case involving mobile subscription services. Google is not the alleged wrongdoer here but is being sued because it allowed the wrongdoer to advertise (AdWords) and the plaintiffs got to the bad…
• 
  Microsoft Launches “Search and Give” Charity For Searching
  The Live Search Blog announced the new launch of Search and Give. When you search and Search and Give, Microsoft will donate a penny each time you use that page to search the Web. Microsoft will donate up to 500 searches per person per month. There are over 1 million…
• 
  Louis Vuitton Offers Google More Trademark Trouble In Europe
  Even as Google is liberalizing its trademark policy in Europe to agree with the US policy, luxury goods maker Luis Vuitton may turn back the clock and force a more restrictive policy on Google. France’s highest court ruled for Louis Vuitton last year in a trademark case involving AdWords. Google…
• 
  Yahoo Deals: Display Ads On Walmart.com, Havas Digital Partnership, Circular Program & CBS Video Deal
  We were just hit with a handful of Yahoo press releases. They include powering the ads on Walmart.com, partnering with Havas Digital for to adopt the Right Media Exchange Platform, working out a video distribution deal with CBS, launching the Yahoo Circular Program for newspapers and all this was announced…
• 
  Google Improves Webmaster Documentation
  Google’s Matt Cutts posted that Google has made major enhancements to their webmaster and SEO documentation. They have clarified and detailed much of the documentation that was in need of an update. The documents that were updated includes the Robots.txt documentation, sapm reporting tools and documentation, IP delivery/geolocation/cloaking documentation, Nofollow…
• 
  Take A Ride In Google’s Hot Air Balloon
  If you visit the Google home page today, you will notice they have a hot air balloon logo up. The logo is to commemorate the first demonstration of a hot air balloon carrying passengers. This event took place on June 4, 1783….
• 
  YouTube’s Former Revenue Chief: “Google Got A Little Big For Me”
  Google is experiencing some bumps in transitioning from a smaller innovator to a larger, more mature player in the market. Over the past year or so there have been numerous employee departures, often to start new companies themselves or to join what used to be called “pre-IPO” startups (e.g., Facebook)….
• 
  Managing In-House SEO For 17,000 Domains
  All complex systems can be broken down into manageable components or modules. SEO is no different; whether you have 17,000 domains or 10,000,000 products SKUs, the system for managing this load is always the same. A complex system doesn’t necessarily mean it’s based purely in technology. Microsoft, Cisco, AOL,…

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• More Translation Bots!, Google Talkabout
• Yahoo Opens Address Books to 3rd-Party Developers, TechCrunch

Business Issues

• CBS and Yahoo in Web video sharing deal, Washington Post
• Google Plans Major Expansion In Its Backyard, New York Times
• LiveDeal in strategic pact with Google; becomes authorized reseller of AdWords, Forbes
• Microsoft’s Interest in Yahoo Based in Online Advertising, CNN Money
• NASA and Google Announce Lease at Ames Research Center, Google
• Why Yahoo’s Yang Is Holding Out, BusinessWeek

Local, Maps & Mobile

• Disney World in 3D in Google Earth has Arrived!, Google Earth Blog
• Google Mapspam now a Global Phenom, Mike Blumenthal
• Yelp plans splashy debut in location-aware mobile market, news.cnet.com

Paid Search & Contextual

• Five Burning Questions, Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog
• Improving Lead Quality from PPC Advertising: Advanced Landing Page Testing, Search Marketing Sage
• Realize a Higher ROI by Creating, Reading and Understanding Goal Funnel Reports, PPC Hero

Searching

• Google Building MoneySupermarket Competitor, BlogStorm
• How Do You Delete or Remove Your Content from RSS Results Like Google Reader?, Search Engine Roundtable
• Shopping Search Engines, The Next Generation, altsearchengines.com
• World’s First Search Engine For Hostels Launches, Search Engine Watch Blog

SEO & SEM

• Managing search engine access to your content, Live Search
• Is the Goal of Your Copy To Rank or to Convert?, Search Engine Guide
• Run a Domain Name Background Check Before Buying, Search Engine Journal
• Three Easy Ways to Fix Broken Links and Stop Unneccessary Visitor Loss, Search Engine Guide

Social Media

• A faster, lighter version of orkut, Orkut Blog
• New UK Law Criminalizes Stealth Marketing Techniques, SEOmoz
• Social Media Marketing Law , Search Engine Journal

Video, Music & Image Search

• New Beta Feature: Video Annotations, YouTube Blog
• YouTube Annotations, Google Operating System

Web Analytics

• Is Google Analytics Cheating You? Use Alternatives!, SEOptimise

Other Items

• Google Tells Everyone: We Are Human : Beyond Search, arnoldit.com
• Google’s Virtual Bookshelf Plans?, SEO By The Sea
• Study: .gov web sites should focus on RSS, XML - not redesigns , Ars Technica
• Your Privacy Is An Illusion: Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan private pics exposed by Yahoo hack, Valleywag

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

• Google Crawling HTML Forms IS Harmful to Your Rankings
• Blackhat Ethics: Whose Rules Are They Anyway?
• Yahoo Is Going to Automatically Optimize Your PPC Account Without You
• Could Stumbleupon Help To Revolutionize Online Search?
• Keyword Ranking Report Catch 22: Part I
• Bringing a Community Together Who is Miles Apart For a Birthday Celebration
• 25 Blog Optimization Tips Even Dear Old Dad Could Ace (Plus 10 More Tips for Mom!)
• Local vs Traditional SEO: Why Citation Is the New Link
• Twitter Poll: Ultimate Time Waster, or Great Tool?
• Google Seems Good Sometimes : Helping Hacked Sites
• Debunked: Only The 1st Anchor Text Counts With Google

Vanessa Fox, Features Editor at
Search Engine Land is moderating this session and speakers include Evan
Roseman, Software Engineer at Google,
Mohit Srivastava, Co-Founder of Faves.com,
Nathan Buggia, Lead Program Manager at
Microsoft Webmaster Center,
and Derrick Wheeler, Senior SEO Architect of Microsoft.com at
Microsoft.

This session will include actual case studies. First example is
Faves.com. Wanted to capture long tail keyword
searches so distributed long tail content across many linkable pages. Tried to
make sure not to have duplicate content but some fallover is okay.

They used enhanced image search within Google Webmaster Central which help to
drive additional long tail traffic. Include a relevant image on each page to
take advantage of this.

They also had a branding problem Was called bluedot.us in which users were
confused over the .us name. Faves.com is more in line with what they actually
offer. They 301 redirected every URL to its counterpart of new domain. They made
sure old and new site maps were verified with Google. They also attempted to
reclaim links that were pointing to old domain.

The effect of domain/brand name change initially was drop in traffic and
rankings but eventually came back. No drop in pages indexed though. Some of the
things they did was to contact Google employee through a friend, posted to
Google Webmaster Central, implemented SEO best practices and then waited 100
days (time it took to rebound).

Now Vanessa is going to go through some live sites. I am going to try to post
some nuggets out of what was discovered to improve/fix the sites that were
represented.

1. HealtheCareers Network -
long URLs, incomplete parameters, required cookies, half cold fusion/half asp,
no site map, and lots of 500 internal server errors were just some of the
problems with this site.

2. Disney.com - Flash site so when
disabling Flash and JavaScript, you see nothing. No content and no links to any
html content. Google cache shows nothing but title. Also seem to be cloaking,
not showing ads to Goglebot. Remedies - provide indexable content, submit site
map to indexable content. Also don’t use "all Flash" but CSS, DHTML and Flash
elements.

3. BodyWork U - Two primary
audiences with no call to action items. Site also looks like directory from home
page. Way too many links on home page. Also blog is irrelevant. Looks more
related to SEOs than bodywork and massage. Site also has duplicate title tags as
well as title tags that are very similar. There are lots of internal server
errors. Panelists claimed crawling site was very slow like server is lagging.
Panelists praised their 404 error page.

While this session was more of a live review of sites then "presentation style,"
you can easily see that there are many problems that can plague sites, even ones
of the caliber of Disney. It truly demonstrates that there is a bright future
for SEO and SEM services!

Here are the sessions recaps:

Click to continue reading…

Vanessa Fox, Features Editor at
Search Engine Land is moderating this session and speakers include David
Golightly, User Experience Developer Lead at
Zillow, Jonathan Hochman, President of
Hochman Consultants and Chris Silver
Smith, Lead Strategist at
GravityStream / Netconcepts.

Vanessa starts off with the question of "what really matters?" Accessibility,
discoverability and conversions are the big stuff that matters. The place to
really start in investigating potential problems is the search results
themselves. Is problem related to indexing, ranking or crawling? Identify
problem first.

Chris is then introduced as first speaker. Diagnosing problems involves a wide
range of criteria. Most issues are basic and easy to diagnose - things like mis-using
robots.txt tag, inadvertently blocking spiders and the like. First question to
ask is "are pages actually indexed?" If not, there is a problem! Does site URLs
have sessionIDs and if so, are they doing anything to resolve that? Google
Webmaster Central is useful to get a bird’s eye view of what Googlebot sees when
visiting your site. The title tag and meta tag data they show can be quite
revealing and interesting.

Chris uses www.web-snifer.net to check
server header status codes to ensure pages are reporting the proper codes. He
uses www.seebot.org to view web pages like a
search engine would. You can also use a Firefox Developer toolbar as well.
Firefox Link Counter Extension provides useful link data. Chris makes reference
to SEOmoz’s SEO Toolbox as a good source of tools for diagnosing problems. One
such tool shows other sites that are resting on your IP address. Use Google Sets
to ID your competitors. You can also see sites that Google thinks are related to
yours.

Jonathan is up next who will dive into some diagnostic stuff. Using a NoScripts
add-on, Jonathan can turn scripts off and discover problems. He shows a problem
with the SMX site when scripts are turned off as well as Gillette. He recommends
the Googlebar (not Toolbar) which is a Firefox plug-in. It has a one-click
button that shows you Google’s cache. Another Firefox add-on he mentions is Live
HTTP Headers which shows header status codes.

With regards to rich media applications, you need to be able to feed the bots
content they can understand. Replace html content with rich media content by
manipulating Document Object Model (DOM). For Silverlight, create SEO-friendly
insertion code or  better yet, bug Microsoft to provide a solution.

Xenu’s Link Sleuth will crawl href links just as a search engine bot would. It
makes it easy to find and fix broken links. It will also help you to create a
site map. Firefox Web Developer Add-on has multiple functions that are valuable.

Watch out for problems with frames, iframes, Flash and Silverlight. Each object
is treated as a separate thing and not as a part of the host page. Ajax as well
can be problematic and it may use iFrames frequently.

Finally David is up to show some problems they found at Zillow. One problem they
had with old database is that it was not highly configurable for multiple data
sets. They also wanted it to be responsive to a wide range of user options. One
problem they had was that many of the functions Zillow had were dependant on
Java Script. With JS turned off, users (and search engines) were not able to use
site. As of 2/08 only 200,000 out of 80,000,000 homes were actually indexed.
They also did not rank well.

They also improved navigation to help bots find pages. Using breadcrumbs, they
help bots find very interior pages. Ajax on the top, not the bottom. In other
words, AJAX should be built on top of functioning web page and not other way
around. SEO should work in concert with great UX.

Q&A:

Here is a recap of "some" (not all) of the questions that were asked and
answered.

1. Is there any automated tools that check to see that redirects are working
   correctly after they have been set up?

   Jonathan recommends Xenu’s Link Sleuth and Vanessa recommends using Google
   Webmaster Central.

2. What are nofollows for?

   Chris answers to control flow of PageRank (PageRank sculpting) and to stop
   flow of link juice to undesirable pages. Also to control blog comment spam.

3. Does private WHOIS put you at disadvantage?

   Chris says probably not. Vanessa says so long as you are not spamming, should
   not be a problem.

4. To optimize or not optimize pop-ups?

   Do you want it as separate page? It may not be good entry page. If JavaScript,
   is not going to be indexable anyway.

Vanessa Fox, Features Editor at
Search Engine Land is moderating this session and speakers include David
Golightly, User Experience Developer Lead at
Zillow, Jonathan Hochman, President of
Hochman Consultants and Chris Silver
Smith, Lead Strategist at
GravityStream / Netconcepts.

Vanessa starts off with the question of "what really matters?" Accessibility,
discoverability and conversions are the big stuff that matters. The place to
really start in investigating potential problems is the search results
themselves. Is problem related to indexing, ranking or crawling? Identify
problem first.

Chris is then introduced as first speaker. Diagnosing problems involves a wide
range of criteria. Most issues are basic and easy to diagnose - things like mis-using
robots.txt tag, inadvertently blocking spiders and the like. First question to
ask is "are pages actually indexed?" If not, there is a problem! Does site URLs
have sessionIDs and if so, are they doing anything to resolve that? Google
Webmaster Central is useful to get a bird’s eye view of what Googlebot sees when
visiting your site. The title tag and meta tag data they show can be quite
revealing and interesting.

Chris uses www.web-snifer.net to check
server header status codes to ensure pages are reporting the proper codes. He
uses www.seebot.org to view web pages like a
search engine would. You can also use a Firefox Developer toolbar as well.
Firefox Link Counter Extension provides useful link data. Chris makes reference
to SEOmoz’s SEO Toolbox as a good source of tools for diagnosing problems. One
such tool shows other sites that are resting on your IP address. Use Google Sets
to ID your competitors. You can also see sites that Google thinks are related to
yours.

Jonathan is up next who will dive into some diagnostic stuff. Using a NoScripts
add-on, Jonathan can turn scripts off and discover problems. He shows a problem
with the SMX site when scripts are turned off as well as Gillette. He recommends
the Googlebar (not Toolbar) which is a Firefox plug-in. It has a one-click
button that shows you Google’s cache. Another Firefox add-on he mentions is Live
HTTP Headers which shows header status codes.

With regards to rich media applications, you need to be able to feed the bots
content they can understand. Replace html content with rich media content by
manipulating Document Object Model (DOM). For Silverlight, create SEO-friendly
insertion code or  better yet, bug Microsoft to provide a solution.

Xenu’s Link Sleuth will crawl href links just as a search engine bot would. It
makes it easy to find and fix broken links. It will also help you to create a
site map. Firefox Web Developer Add-on has multiple functions that are valuable.

Watch out for problems with frames, iframes, Flash and Silverlight. Each object
is treated as a separate thing and not as a part of the host page. Ajax as well
can be problematic and it may use iFrames frequently.

Finally David is up to show some problems they found at Zillow. One problem they
had with old database is that it was not highly configurable for multiple data
sets. They also wanted it to be responsive to a wide range of user options. One
problem they had was that many of the functions Zillow had were dependant on
Java Script. With JS turned off, users (and search engines) were not able to use
site. As of 2/08 only 200,000 out of 80,000,000 homes were actually indexed.
They also did not rank well.

They also improved navigation to help bots find pages. Using breadcrumbs, they
help bots find very interior pages. Ajax on the top, not the bottom. In other
words, AJAX should be built on top of functioning web page and not other way
around. SEO should work in concert with great UX.

Q&A:

Here is a recap of "some" (not all) of the questions that were asked and
answered.

1. Is there any automated tools that check to see that redirects are working
   correctly after they have been set up?

   Jonathan recommends Xenu’s Link Sleuth and Vanessa recommends using Google
   Webmaster Central.

2. What are nofollows for?

   Chris answers to control flow of PageRank (PageRank sculpting) and to stop
   flow of link juice to undesirable pages. Also to control blog comment spam.

3. Does private WHOIS put you at disadvantage?

   Chris says probably not. Vanessa says so long as you are not spamming, should
   not be a problem.

4. To optimize or not optimize pop-ups?

   Do you want it as separate page? It may not be good entry page. If JavaScript,
   is not going to be indexable anyway.

Kevin Lee, Executive Chairman & Co-Founder, Did-It is up first.

Does Bid / Campaign Management Matter?
- Maximize the campaign’s opportunity
- Manage Complexity
- Reduce HR time required to manage campaigns
- Provide actionable reporting while taking its own
- Provide a platform for hypothesis

Auction pressure creates a winner’s curse. By that he means, half the top there is a brilliant marketer and the other half the time you are the idiot. You may be competing against marketers who are acting irrationally.

Bid Management Overviews:
1996 - 2001: SEO evolves, paid bid alerts, did it, go to, google
missed rest…

APIs were originally used for just managing bids. Overtime, the engines made commitments to make the features of the GUI available directly in the api.

If bid management is going to make an intelligent decision on your behalf it has to predict the best move. The objective is to figure out which clicks are the most valuable. You can do personalized click routing, profiling and so on.

Bid management technology has to react to real time markets. Bid landscape is changing, inventory fluctuations, changes in elasticity, delta between bid and billed CPC. changes in conversion due to a variety of causes, changes in conversion value/quality, inventory levels, and budget changes.

How do these technologies evolve?
- Engine level tools, self service, full service
- High volume data and low data volumes
- Levels of control
- Sensitivity adjustments
- Utility to use blended success metrics
- Testing suites / click routing and variable appending

Never-ending optimization concept. The feedback loops and constant testing starting at the high volume segments.

You need to decide which metrics you will use. Think also about segmentation levers such as geographic, dayparting, day of week, network source, demographics and so on.

Chris Zaharias, VP Search Sales, Omniture is next up. He first shows some cool equations of bid management examples. Point is, he as a marketer doesn’t understand all the crazy math…

Bid management is aggregating data, data modeling that data, optimization based on it and bid changes. Behind this are the user interfaces with forecasts. The reporting interfaces have a way to go. Good bid management systems should show you a forecast of what you need to do and spend. What would you get from position one versus position two or three and so on.

What data signals do bid management tools have?
- Impressions
- CTR
- Clicks
- Conversins
- Orders
- ROAS
- CPA

What we are missing in this includes:
- Micro metrics, micro conversions such as
- Product Views
- Carts
- Cart Adds
- Cart Removals
- Checkouts
- Average order value
- Cost Per Step Metrics
- Step By Step Conversion Rates

Data Limitations / Uncertainties
- Traffic Estimation
– 30-50% off, 70% of the time
– Solution is to leverage your data
- Revenue Forecasting
– Impressions clicks
- Recency

Types of Bid Management
- Rules based lets you control things but lack of certainty and time issues
- Portfolio
- Algorithmic

Don’t buy on price alone. Know what model you want before going on. He mentions the Yahoo thing today and Google’s auto-matching.

George Michie, Principal, Search Marketing, Rimm-Kaufman Group is next up.

Requirement #1:
- Proprietary, Sound Statistical Foundation
– Bid based on observation value, not position
– Bid as granularly as statistically possible
– Variable balance btw recency and volume
– Smart mechanism for folding in ancient history
– Treats low CR/high AOV terms differently than the converse

Requirement #2:
- Robust and Flexible Tracking
– Redirect or JavaScript
– Item level tracking
– Sales, Margin, Leads or Hybrids
– Variable cookie windows
– Support internal analytics systems
– Smart Brand, Non-Brand Allocation

Requirement #3:
- Atomic bidding

Requirement #4:
- Back-feed capability
– Frauds and Cancels
– Margin
– New to file vs house file
– Business vs Consumer vs Government
– Order Allocation
– Account funding / lead valuation

Requirement #5:
- API Integration

Analytics Imperatives #1
- Right balance between human and machines
– Anticipatory bidding

Analytics Imperatives #2
- Day parting with brains

Analytics Imperatives #3
- Match type, syndication and geo targeting
– bidding needs to handle differences in traffic quality

Analytics Imperatives #4
- Flexible keyword attribute definitions

Analytics Imperatives #5
- Deep, Flexible Filtering Field
- Granular level
- Very deep as possible

David Rodnitzky, CEO and Founder, PPCAdBuying.com is last up.

Bid manag