Industry News

I’ve been using Google+ a bit more frequently over the past few weeks. Of course, if you read this blog you wouldn’t have noticed. I know this because referral traffic to the site from Google+ is virtually non-existent. I find the whole narrative around Google+ extremely strange, so I’d like to get some of my random thoughts out in the open to see if anyone can add some insight.

First, viewed purely on its own merit Google+ is a fantastic social network. The interface manages to bring...

Yesterday I wrote a story at Search Engine Land named Google: Guest Blogging For Links? You Better Nofollow Those Links. As you can imagine, it caught people's attention - as it should. The title is not as extreme as Marie's Yes, high quality guest posts CAN get you penalized! but it is extreme enough.
In short, if you are...

A webmaster noticed his rankings and traffic from Google sharpely declined after the Penguin 2.0 release and decided to ask about it in the Google Webmaster Help forums.

The webmaster said they noticed a "sudden drop in rankings for branded" right after the Penguin 2.0 release...

This widely linked post from Benedict Evens definitely deserves all the attention it’s been getting. In Glass, Home and solipsism Benedict talks about the fallacy of thinking that customers care as much about your product as you do1:

You can think of people as users or customers — but they’re not yours. They don’t belong to you, and they may barely even care that you exist.

A little bit earlier he discusses Google Glass and says this:

If everyone you know owns a Tesla and is...

Are Google’s search results getting too ad-heavy? A new blog post suggesting that Google’s non-paid listings make up only a tiny fraction of the entire page has sparked some discussion, though the exact percentage actually varies on how you count what’s on the page and from query-to-query.

According to a recent blog post by Aaron Harris, co-founder and CEO of Tutorspree, organic search results — listings that are not paid ads and ranked because Google thinks they are the best answer to a...

Facebook announced yesterday they have expanded Graph Search to all U.S. users and it will be rolling out to more and more of these users over the next few days.

Graph Search launched on January 15th of this year and made a big splash...

We mourned the closing of AltaVista when it was announced at the end of last month. But today’s the day it actually closed. No more AltaVista. Gone. Perhaps no one will suffer as much as the inhabitants of Pawnee, Indiana.

The fictional town from the TV show Parks & Recreation has mentioned AltaVista in various episodes over the years, perhaps giving the now-defunct search engine the most recognition in the Media Blitz episode from Season 3.

Ben Wyatt’s failure as a teenage mayor is...

I recently had to convince a client to pause their redesign efforts and work on their content first. This is how I did it. I tried to stay away from UX jargon and overly technical arguments. There is obviously much more to say about Content Strategy and related disciplines, but this was an exercise in trying to make a succinct argument by only focusing on information that’s most relevant to the client. I’m posting it here in the event that it might be useful to those who have to make similar...

At SMX Advanced, I moderated a panel about technical SEO. Google’s Maile Ohye spoke about SEO best practices for technical implementation of mobile sites based on how Google crawls, indexed, and ranks mobile content and presents it to searchers on mobile devices.

She also talked about Google’s recent announcement that the mobile user experience is a factor in how Google ranks results for smartphone searchers.

Below more details on that, as well as resources on how best to architect your...