Industry News

Yelp may once again feel Google is robbing it of its fair share of search traffic, with a study that’s been leaked to TechCrunch to prove it. A close read of that study actually shows that it proves the opposite — or at least, that it’s certainly not as damning as it sounds.

Leaked Documents Show How Yelp Thinks It’s Getting Screwed By Google is the story over at TechCrunch out today with the study. I’ve taken my own headline from that to do this contrarian view.

Let me say from the start...

It turns out that those in the European Union asking Google to “forget” links they don’t like that appearing for searches on their names are also getting links removed for any search that involves their names and additional words, rather than just their names alone.

Until now, it wasn’t clear that Google was removing links for more than just names on their own. But the company has confirmed to me that this is the situation. Filtering For More Than Just The Name

To understand, let’s...

Cennydd Bowles writes about data-led design vs. idea-led design in Ideas and/or data:

Product design that’s driven entirely by data is horrible. It leads us down a familiar path: the 41 shades of blue, the death by 1000 cuts, the button whose only purpose is to make a metric arc upward. It’s soul-destroying for a designer. But its moderate counterpart, data-informed product design, is fine. It reduces risk, and encourages confidence and accountability.

Product design driven...

When it comes to ranking issues in Google, there are two main reasons why your rankings can drop. The first is you made a technical mistake on your own site...

Conor Friedersdorf talks about the differences between recommendations provided by people and algorithms in Would You Rather Get Tips from an Expert or an Algorithm?

The Amazon.com algorithm is very good at using what you’ve just bought to recommend things that you’ll want to buy, [David Weinberger, a senior researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society] observed, but it can be hard to tell why. Perhaps you’ll be attracted to the content of the recommendation — or perhaps...

I may have missed a small Google update, unconfirmed update, that happened on June 27th/28th and there may have been an update this weekend on July 5th...

We know that Google penalties may follow you when you 301 or create a new site when your old site was burned to the ground. We also know that Google tried to prevent this from a negative SEO standpoint. Google also recommends you start fresh in some severe cases...

Google's head of search spam, Matt Cutts, announced on his blog that he is taking "a leave" through October of this year. In short, he is going completely off the grid and not dealing with anything Google related, i.e. his work...

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” the saying goes. There are plenty of good intentions with the EU’s Right To Be Forgotten mandate, as well as Google’s attempt to meet new obligations under it. Things are still going to hell regardless.

Thanks to the new right, the EU has helped enable convicted pedophiles to ask that their actions be forgotten. It has ensured that businesses convicted of fraudulent activities can seek to have these hidden from the public. And it led this...