Industry News

Make no mistake. Plenty of sites — big brands included — willingly do things in an attempt to rank better on Google that go past SEO tactics that Google itself considers acceptable. However, there’s also no better poster child for how complicated and confusing Google’s rules can be than the fact that Google has had to punish itself with penalties over and over again.

Below, a look back on times when Google took action against itself. FYI, this is a companion piece to our related story on...

The other day, Google's Matt Cutts posted a video answering if poor grammar in comments hurts the page's rankings. In short, the answer is no - bad or poor grammar does not hurt your rankings if done in comments...

Yesterday, Google's Matt Cutts announced on Twitter that they have pushed out a refresh to the Google Page Layout algorithm on or around February 6th.
He did not specify how much this impacted the search results but based on my analysis of the SEO community, it had a very small impact on most SEOs.
This would be the third update...

Flappy Bird — that insufferable iOS game — has been in the news quite a bit recently. One of the more incensed “reviews” comes from Paul Tassi’s Winged Fury:

Flappy Bird is not a game. It’s an addictive collection of pixels you don’t win, you simply play until you’re frustrated enough to delete it. And yet, it’s tapped into some primal sense of accomplishment for this, the attention-deficit world we live in. Have nothing to do for more than a few moments? Whip out your phone and flap your...

First Yandex, now Bing, has beaten Google to offer Bitcoin conversion prices. Bing has announced that people can find the current rates by doing a search on Bing.

Bing shared the news in a blog post today. It can be triggered in various ways, such as asking “one dollar in bitcoin,” which yielded this answer: Yandex rolled out a similar BitCoin conversion feature in December. Like Bing, it uses pricing from the  Coindesk Bitcoin Calculator. WolframAlpha also offers Bitcoin conversion, having...

Last time I have written about Google on this blog I promised to be more positive about the search-monopolist mega-corporation advertising company. You know, it’s not easy for me after all the issues I had with Google. Nonetheless this time I decided to write an endearing article.

For years, maybe even a decade, Google has been explaining to business owners interested in search engine optimization services that you have to

“Beware of SEOs that (…) allege a “special relationship” with...

I’ve been thinking about this whole “being online” thing quite a bit over the past week or so, so James Shelley’s The Overinflated Currency of Personal Brands struck quite a chord:

What happens when the fame contagion infects an entire society? [American historian Daniel Boorstin] speculated that “The quest for celebrity, the pressure for well-knownness, everywhere makes the worker overshadow the work.” Increasingly we will go about our lives and work not actually concerned with the...

Many words found on a web page are much easier to understand given the context of the page itself, as described in a Google patent granted last week. For example, take the word “bank,” which can mean a financial institution, one side of a river, or...