Industry News

Ian Bogost wrote a pretty controversial viewpoint on the Net Neutrality fight. He asks, What Do We Save When We Save the Internet? In short, he thinks it might be time to blow the whole thing up and start over, because we haven’t been very responsible with it:

Another day’s work lost to the vapors of reloads, updates, clicks, and comments. Realizing that you are hyperemployed by the cloud, that you are its unpaid intern. Wondering what you’d have accomplished if you had done anything else...

Yesterday we covered some SEO theories around blocking JavaScript & CSS triggering Panda 4.0 issues. I didn't honestly believe there was a relation, based on the example provided and very few other sites reporting the same effects but now we have a response from a Googler...

Many of the tracking tools show signs of a possible Google update on Saturday, June 21st, the first day of summer. But truth is, there is very little chatter in the discussion forums.
I've seen one thread at BlackHatWorld about maybe SAPE links getting hit again or maybe Payday loan really rolling out this time? And I saw a post...

Yesterday, a Mozzer shared this video with the company over an allstaff thread. I started watching, as I usually do, thinking that 1-2 minutes into the video I’d give up and get back to my email. Wrong. For 19 minutes and 5 seconds, I was captivated. The video isn’t lovely or beautifully done, but it is fascinating, and it told a story with which I was unfamiliar (about a game designer named Phil Fish) with lessons remarkably applicable to the world of marketing.

If you’re A) in marketing,...

German news publishers are picking up where the Belgians left off, a now not-so-proud tradition of suing Google for being included in its listings rather than choosing to opt-out. This time, the publishers want an 11% cut of Google’s revenue related to them being listed.

The news comes from Jeff Jarvis, who writes that a group representing about half the major news publishers in Germany have a started an arbitration process demanding that Google pay 11% of revenue related to listing links to...

Cast your mind back to November 2011, only a few months after the launch of Google+. That’s when Google made one of its biggest Google+ification moves. It demoted a long-standing search feature involving the plus symbol so that searchers could instead more easily reach new “Google+ Pages” that had been launched. Today, this “Direct Connect” feature is forgotten and broken. How Direct Connect Worked

When Direct Connect launched, Google promised that people could go directly to popular pages...

Here is the video from last week's SMX Advanced last week with Matt Cutts and Danny Sullivan...

 

Let’s face it – filling out forms sucks. Nobody enjoys it. Nevertheless, a lot of people endure it because it’s the only way get to the good stuff “behind the form”. The easier and simpler you make the process of filling out your forms, the more conversions you are likely to get.

Here’s a case study where simplifying a 3-step lead gen form increased the completion rate by 30%. I made extensive changes to the form, and in this post we’ll go over all of them one by one. Check out the case...