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

From Search Engine Land:

• Large-Scale Content Optimization Tactics For Enterprise Sites

  For large organizations, keeping a close watch on keyword targeting and on-page optimization across an entire site or network of sites is not an easy task. At the enterprise level, a single site can have millions or tens of millions of pages, and larger organizations such as news publishers may have 20-30 different sites or […

In 2011, Google launched Google+, its long-awaited answer to Facebook. Several months later, in November 2011, Google+ opened up brand pages for businesses to get on board too.

Read Vanessa’s article to find out how your business can use Google+ here at businessonmain.msn.com

…

Now that the holidays have passed, we’re back in full swing at SEOmoz. I’m happy to offer another product announcement for PRO members. We’ve just shipped phase one of our support for Universal Search results, which includes data about local (a.k.a. places) results in Google search results. Whether it's a 7-pack or a blended result, if you care about local SERP results, it's often a pain to find out where you stand…

Every year in the tech world, thousands of us pack a bag with all of our gadgets and head to Las Vegas for the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES). It’s a tech lover’s paradise where you can check out new technologies and talk about the trends of the future with visionary members of the industry. If you’ll be joining us, here are a few places and dates where you can find Google and YouTube…

We understand that payment options are very important to you, so we continuously work to improve them. Today we’re happy to announce that we’ve expanded Western Union Quick Cash® as an AdSense payment method to three additional countries: Singapore, Cambodia and Laos.For those of you who aren’t familiar with this form of payment, Western Union Quick Cash payments are free and will reach you faster than checks…

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Despite what most SEOs will tell you, it’s not easy to create outstanding content that people will want to link to. So many “SEOs” make it seem like there’s a key on your keyboard that magically turns what you just wrote into something link worthy…

I used to spend a lot of my time plowing through Google to find potential link targets for client websites. I still do this a lot but I've changed my approach a lot of the last 12-18 months to try and become a bit more efficient. I've changed my approach so that the first point of call when looking for link targets is lists.

Lists are awesome for link building because someone else has already done some of the hard work for you…

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

From Search Engine Land:

• Search In Pics: Google Bumper Sticker, Knitted Android Sleeve & Yahoo’s CEOs

  In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more…

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 Expands Test Of AdWords That Collect Email Addresses

  In the last couple of weeks, we’ve seen significantly more people reporting they’ve seen AdWords that allow advertisers to collect email addresses directly in the ad unit…

If you've been following my posts on Linkscape's index, you know that we've been trying to aim for fresher, better and larger indices over the past few months, but have been finding some very tough challenges. It turns out that indexing the web, canonicalizing millions of pages and calculating a link graph with quality metrics is super-hard; who knew?

As part of those efforts, we've been working toward an experimental index that leverages a more search-engine style crawler that crawls fresher pages/sites more often and less fresh stuff less frequently…

It was a rough year for Netflix. The handling of its pricing and rebranding of its DVD service has landed the ‘Flix on several “worst of 2011” lists and sent 800,000 paying members packing. Perhaps its timing couldn’t be worse. With Amazon, iTunes, Redbox, Hulu, Crackle, CinemaNow and even Google holding the potential to break out as serious competition, can Netflix afford the slip up or will the damage to its brand sink the ship as early as this year?

Customer Satisfaction in Decline

Netflix 6-point drop on the annual Foresee E-Retail Customer Satisfaction Index from 85 to 79 is a troubling signal…

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

From Search Engine Land:

• How Rick Santorum Is Making His “Google Problem” Worse

  US Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum made a surprise leap ahead to practically tie Mitt Romney in yesterday’s Iowa caucus results. Now people are searching to find out more about him and discovering THAT result which makes comedy show hosts like Jon Stewart giggle…

Google's Superior SEO Strategy

Notice anything odd about your Google+ profile? Does it rank incredibly well in Google’s search results for your own name?

Colleagues grumble that their G+ profile now outranks other online identities that they’ve worked for years on. My own Google+ profile, just 5 months old, ranks #2 for my name. It now ranks higher than both my Twitter and Facebook profiles, even though I use those services far more often…

Dear Google

Your recent decision to invoke a manual penalty on the download page for Google Chrome will have lasting ramifications for the whole of online marketing, whether display advertising, affiliate marketing, and other performance marketing such as CPA models, making many such business models unworkable.

Policing every piece of content produced by marketing partners (affiliates etc) on the offchance that they inadvertantly linked directly to the traffic or buzz benifitiary without using a nofollow or otherwise blocking the direct link is commercially untenable…

WordPress 3.3 created a bug with my SEO plugin, Internal Link Building, such that the credits line normally found at the end of a page would appear in the middle of the post editor. Plugin developer Aaron of AahaCreative.com has coded an update that squashes the bug. The newest version is called 2.1 (I know, I had called a previous version v3, but I made a mistake then).

The ability to block automated internal link building from happening on either pages or posts is also now included, following popular demand…

“Among the few I have indicated, is there no dynamic man of action, the rebel who will help determine the aspect of the collective expression of tomorrow? Ponder this question and know that to make beautiful creations for the sake of their aesthetic value will have no social significance tomorrow, will be non-sensical self-gratification. Every era contains the conditions for providing a rebel…

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: Chrome Page Will Have PageRank Reduced Due To Sponsored Posts

  After reviewing Google’s own sponsored post campaign, while Google says it feels there are no “remaining” violations of its guidelines, the company is going to reduce the PageRank value of the Google Chrome home page…

Many of the poorly ranking websites that I am asked to fix share a common problem – they do not link out to any websites.  Apparently, some people still think this is a terrible idea and go to extremes to never link out to anyone. Taking any idea to an extreme is generally never a good plan.  By changing the outbound link policy, I have been able to help many sites boost their rankings…

In paid search there are a lot of rough Adwords accounts out there. You've seen them I'm sure. I know I've worked on them. We get brought in to assess the situation and make some big decisions around whether an account has potential or whether it would be better just to start fresh. This is one of the most common questions we get asked — how am I doing?

I'm always looking for tools that can help advertisers answer that question…

That is what they say, typically at the bottom of the posts, in blog posts that equate Google Chrome to being the Internet & spread misinformation about how Chrome is good for small business.

• some of those sites are paid posts and have live links in them to Google Chrome without using nofollow & talk about SEO in the same post as well! humphriesnation.com/2011/12/27/google-chrome/
• some of those posts link to the example businesses Google was paying to have covered lazymanandmoney…

With just a few hours of 2011 remaining in Mountain View, Calif., we’re taking our traditional look at the past year on the Official Google Blog, as well as Google’s presence on Google+ and Twitter.

On the blog this year, we published 471 posts (including this one)—17 more than 2010. Those posts were read by nearly 20 million people; we had 19,905,679 unique visitors between January 1 and December 31…

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 Instant Costs Google $65,000 In France

  The Local, a French newspaper, reports Google France was ordered to pay €50,000 ($64,670) to Lyonnaise de Garantie, a French insurance company over a search suggestion that had them labeled as being a “crook…

In this week's special end of the year Whiteboard Friday, Rand shows us how to attract customers and accelerate our marketing efforts by using social media monitoring. Learning how to effectively build up relationships without spamming will be the key to your success in the social realm. We hope you had a wonderful 2011 and don't forget to leave your comments below.

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans…

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

For anyone that's experienced the joys of doing SEO on an exceedingly large site, you know that keeping your content in check isn't easy. Continued iterations of the Panda algorithm have made this fact brutally obvious for anyone that's responsible for more than a few hundred thousand pages…

Website Auditor is one of the 4 tools found in Link-Assistant’s SEO Power Suite. Website Auditor is Link-Assistant’s on-page optimization tool.

We recently reviewed 2 of their other tools, SEO Spyglass and Rank Tracker. You can check out the review of SEO Spyglass here and Rank Tracker here.

What Does Website Auditor Do?

Website Auditor crawls your entire site (or any site you want to research) and gives you a variety of on-page SEO data points to help you analyze the site you are researching…

For all the people saying that you just need the social media to be a marketing success – 4/10 people are 100% inaccessible to you.

Measuring Use of Social Networking Sites.

Typically, these are older people, like those who still want to print the materials on your site and ask to be mailed brochures.

Like this? Get my latest posts by email or RSS to keep up with the latest news and tactics…

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

From Search Engine Land:

• The Most ‘Liked’ Search & Social Posts Of 2011

  The social media experts who write for this column week in and week out don’t just talk – they walk the walk in social media and search marketing. In 2011, we saw interest spike in our Let’s Get Social* column as social media became a significant ranking factor in organic search results, following Danny Sullivan’s […

We’re pleased to announce that professor registration for the 2012 Google Online Marketing Challenge (GOMC 2012), our global student competition, is now open!

Student registration, however, will open January 31, 2012. In order for student teams to participate in the competition, their professors must first register.

But what is this challenge, you ask? 

The Google Online Marketing Challenge is a global online marketing competition for students from any higher education institution in the world…

Another year has come to an end, and 2011 will surely be one to remember. From Google’s algorithm changes to the loss of some search referral data, the launch of Google Plus and the +1 button (hey, there was a lot of news from Google) to the loss of Steve Jobs. Ecommerce continues to be defined by the way consumers use technology, and no doubt, 2012 will bring further advancement and a few surprises…

2011 was a beautiful year for guest posts on SEO ROI as more and more of the web’s top SEOs shared advanced ideas and original material, right here on this blog. I don’t publish rehash, and it shows in the unique tactics, case studies and tools reviewed.

If you want to guest post, read the guest posting guidelines then contact me.

Guest Article Case Studies & Research

What Do CTRs Look Like By Position In 2011? – This excellent research piece by Phil Golobish (T: @saintphilip) of Slingshot SEO was a preview of their massive research piece featuring data from 170,000 visitors to their client websites…