Fun week in search, led off by Google’s 20th employee after 13 years leaving Google to become the CEO of Yahoo, oh…

According to a recent TechCrunch article, Facebook has begun testing a new type of advertisement called “Sponsored Results” ads. The new advertising option, which displays ads within the Facebook search typeahead, allows competitors to target Facebook users from other related businesses. Josh Constine, a technology journalist for TechCrunch, wrote the following of Facebook’s new feature:

While you can to design systems that allow you to create the best ad copy by constantly split testing, it’s much easier to shortcut the process and “steal” from your competitors. Identify the elements your competitors are using three simple steps.

Big data is all the rage right now. If you search Google News for the term, there are 53,5oo thousand results

In July 2011, just about a year ago, Google first started sending out notifications of unnatural links pointing to your web site. Then in March of this year, Google ramped up this notifications and tons of webmasters received them…

For the past year, Google has been sending out link penalty notifications for unnatural links pointing to your web site. Those notifications kicked up a notch earlier this year and since then – especially with the Penguin update, webmasters and SEOs have been obsessed with link removals. Link..

While it might be the simplest way to drive more impressions, any savvy search marketer (and particularly those in the retail sector) in should be aware that leveraging broad match type is far from the only possibility to scale your PPC program. There are plenty of other options out there –I’ll try… Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

One method of content marketing that everyone might not think of initially is creating a white paper. Publishing a white paper can have huge benefits for a business. The main benefit is that you can use it to capture contact information by asking would-be readers to sign up before receiving a copy.

If you can stand out by creating great content and essentially pitch to more than 5 million potential customers with a single online video posted to YouTube, surely that’s far more efficient than any other sales activity is likely to be.

Is Bigger Always Better? This recent infographic from Mogreet weighs the effectiveness of “Narrowcast” vs. “Broadcast” as it relates to social and mobile marketing