Industry News

It’s been reported that Google is working on its own online identifier system, called AdID, which could replace the third-party cookies used by marketers to track people’s online behavior, better targeting their advertising efforts.


Google’s AdID would be transmitted to advertisers and ad networks that have agreed to basic guidelines, which would give consumers more privacy and control over how they browse the Web. Google can automatically reset the AdID every year, and users may be able to create a second AdID for browsing sessions they want to keep private. Google’s switch to the AdID system will definitely shake up the entire digital advertising industry...

There are two different threads at Google Webmaster Help where sites with Google manual actions received responses back from Google citing bad link examples including links already in the site's disavow file.

As you can imagine...

One of the best parts about Foundry’s investment in Moz last Spring was the incredible access to other CEOs, founders, and companies in their portfolio. I’ve had at least a half dozen phone conversations, more than a dozen in-person chats, and a few invaluable get-togethers with my Foundry cousins and learned a tremendous amount every time. It’s something I hope every VC & investor is doing, because these connections are emotionally and professionally fulfilling in ways I never could have...

Tom Simonite wrote a very interesting investigative piece called The Decline of Wikipedia: Even As More People Than Ever Rely on It, Fewer People Create It:

Wikipedia’s community built a system and resource unique in the history of civilization. It proved a worthy, perhaps fatal, match for conventional ways of building encyclopedias. But that community also constructed barriers that deter the newcomers needed to finish the job. Perhaps it was too much to expect that a crowd of Internet...

Veterans of the SEO space will know the name Trellian, a long-time SEO tools company. Veterans may also remember at some of the early search conferences often seeing the Warmuz brothers walking around, Ren and David. Sad news today that Ren is no longer with us.

Pierre Zarokian has a nice In Memoriam post about Ren at Search Engine Watch, and Ren’s brother David has a post about his passing from colon cancer a few days ago. Aged 45, Ren leaves behind his wife and two children, ages 6 and 9....

You don’t necessarily need to make radical changes in order to impact the decisions and actions of your prospects. Often relatively small but strategic changes to critical elements can have major impact on conversions.

Here’s a cool little case study where tweaking the copy in one bullet point increased downloads on an ebook landing page by 18.59%. Background info

A few months ago, I published a free ebook, 7 Universal Conversion Optimization Principles. Being the test junkie that I am,...

Google announced they now support the ability for app developers to submit the content within their Android apps to Google, somewhat like through a Sitemap file. This way, Google can index the content, and then display the content within the search results...

Google announced a new outstanding feature for Google Webmaster Tools named Security Issues.

This new dashboard helps quickly know what security issues your site has...

Jonathan Franzen wrote a Guardian piece on what’s wrong with the modern world. It’s long and dense and sometimes requires multiple re-readings to figure out what’s going on, but he gives us much to think about. Let’s just say that he’s not a fan of what technology is doing to us:

One of the worst things about the internet is that it tempts everyone to be a sophisticate — to take positions on what is hip and to consider, under pain of being considered unhip, the positions that everyone...