Industry News

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...

Being a moderately analytical marketer, I should be pretty smart about assuming a correlation between two events that might not necessarily exist. And yet, for the past few years, I’ve foolishly done the opposite. Below is a chart of my Twitter follower growth from Followerwonk over the past 60 days:

The spikes are probably days when I’ve sent some awesome tweets that went viral and reached a lot of new folks who then clicked the “follow” button. What else could they be, right? What could...

Yesterday, Google’s Matt Cutts tweeted a reminder that Google makes one or two algorithm changes every day (around 500 a year).



Google talked about this in a video they published last year, but it can be easy to forget.



The algorithm changes that Google announces are only a tiny fraction of the changes they are making. And if your site loses traffic on a day that Google announces a change, it’s possible that what Google announced isn’t what caused the drop.

The one question I...

Google has published “information for webmasters” as least as far back as 2001. The original information included “do’s and don’ts” and “fact and fiction”.



In 2003, Google expanded this information to include a specific set of “webmaster guidelines”:  

In 2006, www.google.com/webmasters became Google Webmaster Central, and the information for webmasters became a complete help center with lots of details and explanations.

Google has continued to refine and evolve their information...