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

From Search Engine Land:

• Smartphone Bot Case Study: The Google Smartphone Bot On Holiday In Australia

  While Google’s new smartphone bot has been announced, it does not appear to be widely deployed yet; at least that is what I said during a recent presentation in Sydney, where I had the pleasure of meeting Alistair Lattimore (Al). Al does CRO, SEO and agency management for Mantra Group, which is the second largest [...]

Majestic SEO announced a new set of link metrics they came up with that should give Google’s PageRank metric and SEOmoz’s MozRank a run for their money.

Majestic SEO’s new metrics are named Flow Metrics and are grouped into two categories; trust flow and citation flow.

• Citation Flow is a number of predicting how influential a URL might be based on how many sites link to it.
• Trust Flow is a number predicting how trustworthy a page is based on how trustworthy sites tend to link to trustworthy neighbors.

While there’s no arguing with the fact that Google’s Adwords program is the dominant player in the PPC industry, it’s by no means the only option when it comes to paying for website traffic.

In fact, the size of the Google Adwords program creates a number of challenges for “small-time” webmasters. The service’s immense popularity has resulted in extreme competition, driving up keyword bid prices and lowering ad placements for sites running on smaller budgets.

If you’ve been struggling to gain traction on this highly competitive network, take a look at the following PPC alternatives for generating paid traffic.

Google is playing a sophisticated form of “head games” with antitrust regulators. A second legal report-cum-brief (embedded below) has appeared. It argues that antitrust challenges against Google are likely to fail because Google’s critics’ arguments lack legal merit and/or make little sense from a policy perspective.

The report was written by lawyers from the Ammori Group, “a law firm and Internet-law consulting practice whose clients include Google Inc.”

I have been fielding a lot of calls from sites big and small that believe they got hit by Penguin, Google’s “over-optimization” algorithm. Or maybe it was Panda? Who knows? Traffic is down and everybody is freaking out.

I have a particular soft spot in my heart for the small, local businesses that have been hit, in many cases because they bought into someone’s spammy linkbuilding scheme.

I have had a few discussions with other SEOs who are attempting to take down clients’ spammy looking links, and while that might be effective, the ROI on finding and getting all of those links deleted seems iffy at best.

While Google’s new smartphone bot has been announced, it does not appear to be widely deployed yet; at least that is what I said during a recent presentation in Sydney, where I had the pleasure of meeting Alistair Lattimore (Al). Al does CRO, SEO and agency management for Mantra Group, which is the second largest accommodation provider in Australia with over 100 hotels, retreats and resorts throughout Australia and New Zealand.

Al was at the talk in Sydney and let me know that the smartphone bot had visited some of the sites he is responsible for and told me about the initial results. Mantra.com.au is the site we discussed most; iPhones and Androids are now showing the mobile-optimized urls instead of desktop urls in some (not all) searches.

Google has a special animated logo on their home pages worldwide to celebrate Mother’s Day. Below is both the animated and static version of the Mother’s Day logo.

A special Happy Mother’s Day to all the search geek Mother’s out there!

Google is not the only search engine with a logo, Bing, Yahoo and others have. Here is Bing and Yahoo’s and to see more, check out the Search Engine Roundtable.

Past Mother’s Day Logo Stories:

• Google’s 2011 Mother’s Day Logo More Logos
• Happy Mother’s Day Logos From Google Other Search Engines

Kara Swisher at AllThingsD is reporting that embattled Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson is going to step down for “personal reasons.” Swisher has one or more “moles” inside the company and consistently gets inside information — which generally turns out to be correct.

Thompson’s “personal reasons,” as we all know, are: misrepresenting that he had a computer science degree. Yahoo EVP Ross Levinsohn is reportedly set to become interim CEO, with the apparent hope that he could take the helm permanently.

Swisher adds that the situation is still in flux and could change. The board is apparently meeting this morning.

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 Big Data Changed Crime Fighting Is Changing The Practice Of SEO

  In the mid 1990’s, New York city Mayor Rudolph Giuliani introduced a technology-based crime measurement system called CompStat. The system enabled Police leadership, for the first time, to discern crime trends and respond to crime fluctuations on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis rather than the limited incident-by-incident view they previously had. The system is credited with a [...]

Advertisers have long been able to simulate the results of bid changes at the keyword and ad group level, and, now, they can do so at the campaign level, as well, Google has announced.

The change will allow advertisers to model changes even when there’s not enough data to do so at the keyword or ad group level. They can also see what would happen if they raised or lowered all of their bids within the campaign by a certain percentage — say, 5%. Advertisers can see what would result if you changed all campaign bids to the same fixed value.

Apple’s Siri search feature for the iPhone 4S thinks the Nokia Lumia 900 is the best phone ever? Actually, it’s Wolfram Alpha that thinks this, based on all of four user reviews. While it’s a chuckle that Siri seemed to be recommending the Nokia, it’s a better reminder that Siri itself doesn’t answer questions but provides answers from others. Indeed, that’s why the Nokia Lumia itself arguably recommends the iPhone and Android.

We’ve been here before, such last December, when Apple was accused of preventing Siri from finding abortion clinics. Actually, that was largely down to abortion clinics themselves not calling themselves that, as my post from last year explains: Why Siri Can’t Find Abortion Clinics How It’s Not An Apple Conspiracy.

Recently, one of my SEO colleagues contacted me to learn how website usability and SEO are related — more than what you can get from online reading. “I’m all for expanding my knowledge and agree this is the best place to focus,” he said.

He asked for some books to read, online courses to take, webinars to attend, and so forth. I gave him a partial list as a solid starting point.

When I sent him an upcoming webinar list (with descriptions and agendas) that had me excited, he replied, “I looked at these agendas, and I didn’t see anything related to search engines and SEO.”

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.

Google HVAC Logo:

Source: Flickr

Yahoo MAD logo:

Source: startupgrind.com

View From Google Glasses:

Source: Google+

Google Office Jousting:

Source: Google+

Related Topics: Search In Pictures

Article source: http://feeds.searchengineland.com/~r/searchengineland/~3/jpb8cYoebIM/search-in-pics-yahoo-mad-logo-google-glass-view-office-jousting-at-google-120994

The case could easily be made that keyword list construction is the most vital part of the paid search marketing process. Yes, optimization is clearly a crucial component to profitable SEM, yet without the right keywords (and campaign/ad group structure), the chance for success drops dramatically.

So, wouldn’t you think that after more than a decade of search marketing and literally tens of billions of dollars in the U.S. alone in paid search ad revenue, that someone would come along and actually build a powerful keyword generation tool?

In the mid 1990’s, New York city Mayor Rudolph Giuliani introduced a technology-based crime measurement system called CompStat. The system enabled Police leadership, for the first time, to discern crime trends and respond to crime fluctuations on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis rather than the limited incident-by-incident view they previously had.

The system is credited with a 60% drop in major crime and has subsequently been adopted by major cities including Washington DC, Los Angeles, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. Interestingly, all that really sparked the change was the acquisition of information—trend insights into neighborhood crime patterns over time.

It’s that time again: April comScore qSearch data are coming out tomorrow. But the financial analysts are releasing it first to their clients and others subscribed to their missives.

According to our source, comScore will report that both Google and Bing have made small, incremental gains since last month and seen modest growth since last year. One or both are growing, it appears, at Yahoo’s expense. AOL and Ask are basically flat.

Yahoo is at its lowest point to date and has recorded its eighth straight monthly decline in terms of market share. Our source believes that Yahoo’s share could sink much lower over time.

If you’re a retailer and want to boost traffic and conversions, an image SEO strategy using Pinterest can provide great results fairly quickly. Pinterest activity will not only increase your referral traffic, it can help you connect with your customers and prospects in a mutually beneficial way.

In case you haven’t noticed, it’s the age of images in search, as so aptly put in AdAge Digital’s recent article, In Age of Pinterest, Instagram, Marketers Need an Image strategy.

Pinterest, currently hot after two years on the Web, has over 11 million registered users, 9 million of which are monthly active Facebook-connected users.

In this column, we routinely write about some fairly advanced topics: Next-level optimization, automated bidding algorithms, hyper-targeted search campaigns, paid vs. organic search, etc. Lost in all this is the underlying discussion around the need to hit your financial goals.

The majority of large enterprises engage in annual planning, which means that as SEM managers, we are tied to pretty strict financial goals. While all the advanced topics sound good and do warrant execution, in a world of limited resources sometimes we just need to hunker down and focus on hitting Plan.

Bing announced a relaunch of its search engine today, with a big emphasis on bringing social into search. But wait! Didn’t Bing already have social as part of its search experience? Yes, but now the search engine hopes to do it better, especially by largely off-loading social elements into a new sidebar area.

The new features will appear for Bing users in the United States the coming days, taking several weeks to go live fully for everyone. Those who want to increase the odds of early access can visit this notification page.

Danny and I are here at the Bing Search Summit in San Francisco. For a comprehensive overview of the new Bing features, see Danny’s article on the “new Bing.”

Microsoft’s Qi Lu has just taken the stage and is talking about the launch of the new Bing. He’s discussing the need to “reorganize the web for task completion.” The web is no longer a collection of documents; it’s a web of documents, places and people. “It’s dramatically richer today,” than it was just a few years ago he says.