Industry News

Josh Emerson offers some words of advice that we should all take to heart:

But perhaps the most important thing I want to highlight here, is that the answer to most questions is it depends, and very often in the grey area between black and white. Try not to take extreme views on things, and perhaps see that there is always another level of complexity to be discovered in any decision you make.

We just came out of a season of arguing whether or not Flat Design is the answer to...

In The Guardian Tom Meltzer asks, Are our household appliances getting too complicated? Despite violating Betteridge’s law of headlines he makes some good points:

“The innovation is obviously being driven by manufacturers’ desire to add value and to differentiate themselves,” says analyst Neil Mason, head of retail research at market research company Mintel. “But from a consumer’s point of view, what they want is convenience and simplicity. When you run into trouble is when you add all...

Had a bad experience purchasing from an online merchant? Google says it wants to protect searchers from that, and it may crackdown later this year with changes intended to prevent bad merchants from ranking well.

The news came during the “How to Rank Better in Google & Bing” session that I moderated yesterday at the SXSW conference in Austin. Google’s chief web spam fighter Matt Cutts responded to concerns one merchant had about bad competitors outranking him.

Cutts said: We have a...

Figuring out what to read (and what to believe) about Big Data is becoming a Big Data problem in and of itself1. I wrote The hype, benefits, and dangers of Big Data a while ago to give an overview of what’s out there, but there are two more interesting articles from the last week that I’d like to highlight as well.

First, on the HBR blog Jake Porway talks about Big Data and social entrepreneurship and makes the point that You Can’t Just Hack Your Way to Social Change:

Any data...

The rumors floating around the SEO industry right now is that Google has crushed yet another link network. SAPE links, a link network I honestly never heard of...

Remember your favorite part of the Google how search works portal? Yea, how you can see examples of pages Google removed from their index manually on the fighting spam page.
I made a search engine you can use to see which sites were delisted by Google.

Google recently released an "interactive infographic" titled "how search works". I ignored it until Barry Schwartz convinced me to take a second look. The infographic starts with the number of "30 trillion individual pages" Google has in its index.

Later on in the infographic another number is mentioned: 0.22% of all domains in the Google index have been subject to a manual penalty.

Remember that Google also employs algorithmic aka automated penalties which are much more common. Anyway, I...

Two weeks ago we reported that Interflora was penalized for advertorial link spam by Google. What did that result in? An 11-day Google penalty.
I assume Interflora was able to convince all the UK newspapers to pull the advertorials and submitted a reconsideration request. If only it was that easy for others.