Industry News

It’s been almost two weeks since Google launched its link disavowal tool. Some have been busy diving in and using it, but others have had more detailed questions about it. We’ve got some answers, from the head of Google’s web spam team, Matt Cutts.

Question:How do people know what links they should remove?

Answer:When we’re taking targeted action on some specific links, the emails that go out now include examples of bad links. We provide example links to guide sites that want to clean up...

Google is running a special logo today to honor Bob Ross, painter, art instructor and host of “The Joy Of Painting,” which aired for over a decade in the US and Canada.

Ross’s show ran from 1983 through 1994, when he stopped to fight lymphoma, which he later died from in 1995, at age 52. He was born on October 29, 1942. Today’s “Google Doodle” logo honors what would have been his 70th birthday.

You can read more about Ross’s life in his Wikipedia entry here. PBS also recently released a...

I had lunch with Thomas from our production engineering team today. During our chat, we talked about the future of the company’s organizational structure and plans to split into feature-focused teams after a big launch we have planned for 2013. Thomas noted that in his previous role with Amazon, teams were judged directly against metrics for the features on which they worked, and this had both good and bad elements.“choose wisely, for while the true Grail will bring you life, the false Grail...

Of all the tools I use each day on the web, perhaps none frustrates me more than bit.ly. I like being able to track all the sharing I do across networks with a single URL shortener, but the site’s frustrating from numerous levels. Historic data and habit are most of what keeps me from moving to other services (along with a lack of knowledge of better platforms, though awe.sm seems worth a shot).

We can do better than being forced to take multiple, non-intuitive actions to shorten a URL and...