Industry News

In Why Every Gadget You Own Suddenly Wants To Talk To You Mark Wilson imagines a scenario where every single thing in your home is always connected, always listening:

As consumers, we’re caught in the middle of the convenience. Do we choose to side with Siri, Alexa, or Cortana, and talk only to her, despite looming bias and the risk of growing dependent on a single voice—a voice that could take advantage of us? Or do we side with a free market that gives a voice to every stupid...

There has been this steady chatter for the past few days around webmasters and SEOs seeing ranking changes and fluctuations in the search results. It's been ever since what I thought were false reports of a Google update earlier this week...

I really enjoyed Clive Thompson’s history of How the Phonograph Changed Music Forever. I found a couple of observations particularly interesting. First, on the “new” phenomenon of listening to music alone:

A curious new behavior emerged: listening to music alone. Previously, music was most often highly social, with a family gathering together around a piano, or a group of people hearing a band in a bar. But now you could immerse yourself in isolation. In 1923, the writer Orlo Williams...

As expected, even though it took so long, Google finally announced on Google+ that they have revamped the Crawl Errors report for Android Apps in the Google Search Console.
Google said they updated and simplified the app crawl error types...

Buried somewhere in the middle of Will Oremus’s article about Twitter’s decision to increase the 140-character limit we find this important paragraph:

What’s really changing here, then, is not the length of the tweet. It’s where that link at the bottom takes you when you click on it—or, rather, where it doesn’t take you. Instead of funneling traffic to blogs, news sites, and other sites around the Web, the “read more” button will keep you playing in Twitter’s own garden.

I’m...

December was a pretty quiet month, like usual. Google tends to be shy when pushing out updates, but we did see several potential updates which are linked to below. Google did not go forward with Penguin 4.0 and should be pushing it this coming month...

I’m pretty unsentimental about things like birthdays and new years, but I’m also only human and sometimes things sneak up on you unexpectedly. Earlier this week I was standing in our kitchen, staring into space as I waited for the water to boil, and suddenly my eyes focused on this—a series of guidelines my wife wrote down for our 6-year old daughter during the course of a particular trying day with her:



I looked at it, and then I saw it, and then I read it. And then I read it. And...

Jon Kolko wrote a wonderful personal essay called Look, I Made a Thing: Confidence in Making:

If you stick with it, through the years of shitty ashtrays and embarrassing critiques and rejections, you start to learn that making things is powerful, mostly because on the way to making things, you build confidence. You can take on problems that are out of your league. You can become a teacher with no teaching experience. You can make money and provide value. You can lead a conversation,...

The New Year has brought a fresh look for our Search Marketing Expo conference, with a new logo, website and tagline. Here’s a guide to all the changes we’re excited about. Obsessed With SEO & SEM

Search Marketing Expo — SMX — is the search marketing conference that Search Engine Land has produced since 2007. SMX is unique because it’s the only major conference series that’s entirely focused on search.

We love the breadth of digital marketing. That’s why we operate our Marketing Land...