After more than two years, and a few important concessions from Google, the Czech Republic is letting the company resume its Street View service.

As Czech Position reports, Google has agreed to several conditions put forth by the Czech Office for Personal Data Protection:

• Google will take photos closer to ground level to avoid photographing personal property over fences/walls.
• Google will give Czech citizens a method to demand that their property be removed from Street View.
• Google will blur license plates/registration information on vehicles.
• Google will pre-announce when it’s planning to photograph in Czech towns and cities.

After 17 straight months of gains in market share, Google’s Chrome web browser dropped 0.17 percent in January, and the company that tracks browser market share suggests that it’s because Google penalized Chrome after a botched sponsored blog post campaign.

The figures come from Net Applications, which says it tracks about 160 million unique visits per month to a worldwide network of more than 40,000 sites.

According to Net Applications, Firefox and Safari also saw market share losses in January. While they were declining, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer gained 1.09%, its biggest monthly gain in at least two years.

I spend a lot of time trying to figure out exactly what is wrong with some clients’ analytics installs. Unlike types or broken code, or misspelled words – issues with tracking scripts don’t always raise their hands and scream, “Hey dummy, you deleted the /script tag!”

I thought it would be handy for the beginners out there to have a few tips for finding issues with your tracking and some tricks to resolving those issues without tearing your hair out.

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

From Search Engine Land:

• 5 Common Tracking Problems: How To Troubleshoot Fix Them

  I spend a lot of time trying to figure out exactly what is wrong with some clients’ analytics installs. Unlike types or broken code, or misspelled words – issues with tracking scripts don’t always raise their hands and scream, “Hey dummy, you deleted the /script tag!” I thought it would be handy for the beginners [...]

It’s the first Friday of the month, and that seems to be when Google has decided to push out its monthly update of search tweaks from the prior month. The January update is out and it contains a few interesting nuggets.

Panda In The Pipelines

There’s a mention of the Panda algorithm update that we wrote about last week, but it also includes a somewhat cryptic reference to being more integrated into Google’s “pipelines.”

We improved how Panda interacts with our indexing and ranking systems, making it more integrated into our pipelines.

Several members of Congress continued to express reservations about Google’s new privacy policy after a closed-door meeting on Thursday, with one House member saying that Google’s handling of sensitive medical searches may violate HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

Members of the House Energy and Commerce committee grilled Pablo Chavez, Google’s director of public policy, and Google attorney Michael Yang for about two hours. After the meeting, several of the Representatives expressed their unhappiness with Google’s answers on a variety of privacy issues — questions brought on by Google’s recent announcement that it will combine all of its privacy policies into one, which will allow the company to share user information across its services.

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.

Bing Drink In A Glass:

Image via Flickr.

Behind The Scenes On President Obama’s Live Google Hangout:

Image via Google+.

Google+ Crunchie Winner:

Image via Google+.

SEO Google Cake:

Image via Facebook.

Zuckerberg’s IPO Desk Sign:

Image via Facebook.

Optimizing Keywords and Negatives is a task I recommend to my clients that they do regularly. In this How To, I will include some real-world experience along with the basics of how to use the AdWords Search Term View to optimize keywords and negatives.

What Is Search Terms View?

The AdWords Search Terms View shows us the performance metrics on the Search Terms that matched against our Keywords (more detail on the difference between Search Terms and Keywords is coming up later in this post). Advertisers can use this data to optimize the Keywords and Negatives in their account.

The opinions on what makes a form or Web application user friendly may vary but most everyone dislikes Captcha fields. Some Captcha’s are so difficult to decipher they actually increase form and page abandonment.

Along with the freedom the Internet provides humans, it is unfortunately humans who also created barriers to our free flow of information. It’s uncanny the amount of search engine marketing money spent to bring people into websites, only to chase them back out because they must prove they are indeed, human.

On Wednesday, Feb 1, 2012, we published an article discussing some changes StumbleUpon made during their recent redesign which removed source links from their content pages and forced all users to view content from the site through an iframed toolbar, which they could not close if they were logged in.

One of the things I have always really loved about StumbleUpon is that unlike many social communities, they listen to their users and always try to move the site forward based on user feedback and testing.

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

From Search Engine Land:

• Microsoft adCenter Increases Ad Description, Adds Budget Widget More Mobile Targeting Options

  Microsoft announced their January 2012 adCenter release update. The update includes three major additions to adCenter: (1) adCenter increased the ad description length by one additional character from 70 to 71. They did this to help with import issues from other advertising products. (2) There is a new quick campaign budget overview widget to get [...]

During the week of January 4th, I had the privilege of spending a week with the Bing and adCenter teams in Bellevue. First off, I would like to thank them both for their tremendous hospitality.

Today, I want to outline some of the most interesting conclusions I have from the meetings with the adCenter team on that trip. One of the things I learned is what the adCenter team is doing to make it more attractive for enterprise scale customers to leverage adCenter to expand the PPC efforts.

“Why can’t you just give me a straight answer?”

Johanna’s voice showed a trace of irritation.  “All I’m asking is how much you charge for SEO services!”

I smiled. This was familiar terrain. As an SEO consultant, almost every client asks me a similar question. My answer is always the same.

“It depends. On many things. Because SEO is not a turn-key solution you plug in to play.”

“Wait.  You’re an expert – and you can’t tell me what you’ll charge?!”

That’s when I explain why and when SEO matters, and the dynamic process of fixing my price for SEO consulting.

Microsoft announced their January 2012 adCenter release update. The update includes three major additions to adCenter:

(1) adCenter increased the ad description length by one additional character from 70 to 71. They did this to help with import issues from other advertising products.

(2) There is a new quick campaign budget overview widget to get your budget details immediately.

(3) They added more mobile ad targeting to allow you to mobile OS such as Windows Phone, iPhone, Android, and Blackberry and Tablet OS options including iOS, Android, and RIM.

Here is where it is currently supported:

StumbleUpon, who happens to be one of the more popular and successful social media sites with over 20 million users (doubling from 10 million in about a year and a half), recently launched one of the biggest redesigns I can remember… basically changing everything about the site as a whole.

Having recently removed blogs, themes, and groups off the site, the new changes continue to move away from any focus on the site and more towards getting users back into the toolbar, whether iframed or installed.

Here is a video StumbleUpon released about the new changes:

Google faces a $660,000 fine after a French court ruling that the company is abusing its dominant position in mapping by making Google Maps free.

According to The Economic Times, the French commercial court “upheld an unfair competition complaint lodged by Bottin Cartographes against Google France and its parent company Google Inc. for providing free web mapping services to some businesses.”

Bottin Cartographes provides mapping services for a cost, and its website boasts several business clients such as Louis Vuitton, Airbus and several automobile manufacturers.

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

From Search Engine Land:

• French Court Fines Google $660,000 Because Google Maps Is Free

  Google faces a $660,000 fine after a French court ruling that the company is abusing its dominant position in mapping by making Google Maps free. According to The Economic Times, the French commercial court “upheld an unfair competition complaint lodged by Bottin Cartographes against Google France and its parent company Google Inc. for providing free [...]

While search engine marketing conference attendance for agency staff is almost a given of the job, in-house search engine marketers may find themselves more challenged to justify the expense, both in time and money of conference attendance.

Conferences like Search Marketing Expo (SMX) provide a host of benefits that more than justify the cost; the challenge is in convincing the budget gatekeepers to agree.

Show The ROI

Unlike more static professional disciplines, search engine marketing, both paid and natural, is in a constant state of evolution. In-house search engine marketing is a young profession; even the oldest pros can have only about ten to twelve years on-the-job-experience (ever increasing, but not as much as say, a career lawyer or accountant).

Fact or Fiction? Writing search PPC ad copy promoting B2B brands, products or services isn’t as fun as promoting some sexy, fabulous, coveted line of B2C goods because B2B, by nature, is boring.

Fiction! Fiction, I say! Clever marketers embrace the opportunity to market B2B because they recognize and respect the challenge it embodies: To make the ostensibly boring not only saleable, but beautiful.

The good news is this is a goal any ambitious marketer can achieve. Even you. All you needs is a creative mind (or team of creative minds), willingness to think outside of the box, courage to test the legal department’s limits, about 90 minutes to spare, a fair amount of caffeine, and this trusty blueprint for more fruitful B2B ad creative brainstorms.

As performance marketers, it’s our job to find the valuable clicks and filter out the crap. By tracking specific events through cookies and pixels, we attribute revenue to clicks and keywords. Newer tools like conversion funnels allow us to further identify which clicks lead to subsequent clicks which in turn lead to conversions.

Generally speaking, we use conversion funnels to show the value of early consumer touch points such as display ads, Facebook ads, or generic paid search.

So, for example, even if clicks from Facebook don’t lead to many conversions, we can determine that there is some value in guaranteeing that a user reaching your site fits a particular profile ad guaranteed by Facebook’s incredible demographic targeting.