Industry News

Expedia appears to have been hit by a Google penalty related to unnatural links. So what do Google and Expedia have to say about the situation? No comment.

As covered yesterday, the visibility of Expedia listings in Google appears to have recently plunged, according to measurements by Searchmetrics:



This comes after accusations last month, which sparked discussion, that Expedia was obtaining links in a way that go against Google’s guidelines.

So, did Google punish Expedia and if...

This is a guest post by Matt Cutts, Google’s “head of spam” by day and well known SEO blogger by night. I added some text decoration here and there to stress the main message.

In my recent article on the decay of guest blogging for SEO I raised some of the most common issues regarding low quality albeit spammy link building with guest articles. This article raised some eyebrows to say the least. To make it unmistakably clear that guest blogging is not bad by definition I decided to speak out...

Yesterday, Matt Cutts, Google's head of search spam and the most loved to be hated man at Google, posted on his personal blog that guest blogging is dead at least for link building or SEO purposes...

Yesterday morning Patrick Altoft tweeted to me that SearchMetrics is reporting Expedia lost about 25% of their Google traffic overnight.

SearchMetric is indeed reporting this and I confirmed it with Marcus Tober from SearchMetrics via email...

Every time someone writes about smart cities my ears perk up. Sommer Mathis just published a great interview with Anthony Townsend (the author of the new book Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia). From The Rise and Fall and Eventual Rise Again of the ‘Smart City’, quoting Townsend:

But our “smart” cities are going to look much more like the web, where there’s going to be a lot of things deployed by individual decision, talking to each other through open...

Okay, I’m calling it: if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop. Why? Because over time it’s become a more and more spammy practice, and if you’re doing a lot of guest blogging then you’re hanging out with really bad company.

Back in the day, guest blogging used to be a respectable thing, much like getting a coveted, respected author to write the introduction of your book. It’s not that way any more. Here’s an example unsolicited, spam email...

Google announced on Friday their efforts to keep their ad network safe, in-line and trustworthy. They shared some pretty crazy stats on what that means for their ad network...

I’ve been thinking about Miya Tokumitsu’s In the Name of Love for days now. Miya argues that the mantra “Do what you love” devalues work and hurts workers:

There’s little doubt that “do what you love” (DWYL) is now the unofficial work mantra for our time. The problem with DWYL, however, is that it leads not to salvation but to the devaluation of actual work—and more importantly, the dehumanization of the vast majority of laborers. [...]

“Do what you love” disguises the fact that...

James Stout explains how Responsive Design won’t fix your usability issues for you. If your site is bad before the redesign, those problems won’t just magically go away once you’ve gone responsive. It’s a good article, and I especially like this bit:

But in the face of all this great technology, it’s more important than ever to avoid the “features for features’ sake” pitfall. Maintain that ever-present purpose and goal and be deterministic concerning whether these technologies help drive...