Industry News

Something is going on and it is getting bigger and bigger as time goes on. On September 2nd we reported significant changes in the Google search results...

A week ago Friday, September 2nd, we reported on a Google algorithm update, which turned out to be seen by the vast majority of SEOs and webmasters out there. Now I am seeing some more early chatter...

In the Google Analytics Blog on September 2, was an article that site owners shouldn’t miss. If you did, you should go check it out. The post is Explore important insights from your data — automatically.

I have access to a number of Google...

Google announced early this morning that they are reminding webmasters to not try to use widget links as a link building strategy...

The Google Penguin Update is a filter designed to help Google combat severe forms of spam in its search results. This page tells you how long it has been since the last Penguin Update, which is helpful for those hoping to escape the penalty.

Penguin operates on a periodic basis. When it happens, it catches and penalizes a set of sites. It also releases some sites previously caught, if they’ve reformed themselves in a way that Google likes.

During the time between updates, any sites...

Google's John Mueller said a few minutes ago on YouTube Live around 5 minutes into the video that the weekend update rumors are not Penguin related. So he said you can "rule out" Penguin in terms of saying the Penguin algorithm was updated this weekend...

James Gill has a good overview of How bad features are born:

Most importantly, does this feature deserve to exist? Why are you working on it?

If you’re embarking on a new feature primarily because you’ve seen a competitor release something similar, then you probably haven’t thoroughly considered or even identified the problem you’re trying to solve. If you’re jumping into a new feature because it seems like “it wouldn’t be too hard to do” that’s great, but does it actually...

Joe Tullio has some good tips for remote teams in Distributed UX teams: Early lessons learned. This part, in particular, is something I think many teams ignore because it can feel like busywork:

At Google, we have an internal “snippets” tool for posting regular updates on our work, typically at a weekly cadence. Snippets serve to share the latest mock versions, research reports, study plans, hiring updates, and anything else that feels noteworthy.

To be fair, snippets are a...

It has been almost a month since we reported Google ranking changes, which is rare and it looks like many folks are seeing changes in the core web search results as of early this morning. This is unrelated to the major local ranking changes I reported this morning...