Industry News

Catch up on interesting new discussion and industry news.

    Google: If You Repeatedly Spam, You Will See Harder Penalty Actions

    rustybrick
    by rustybrick
    Sep 18, 2015
    Google published a blog post this morning named Repeated violations of Webmaster Guidelines explaining that if you have repeated violations of Google's Webmaster Guidelines and those violations lead to numerous manual actions...

    Bing Shutting Down Link Explorer Three Years After Resurrecting Yahoo Site Explorer

    rustybrick
    by rustybrick
    Sep 17, 2015
    Duane Forrester from Bing announced they are shutting down the Link Explorer tool that they launched in June 2012.

    Link Explorer is a Bing powered competitive link analysis tool that won over the SEO community...

    Google: We're Suing An SEO Company For Robocalling & Confusing Businesses

    rustybrick
    by rustybrick
    Sep 17, 2015
    Google announced yesterday that they are sick and tired of hearing complaints from their users that SEO companies are presenting to represent Google and help them claim their business on Google My Business (Google Maps)...

    What they say vs. what they do

    by Rian van der Merwe
    Sep 16, 2015
    If you invest in growth before you have retention, you’re renting users, not acquiring them.

    — Gillian Morris in a great post about what users say vs. what they do.

    With iOS 9, Apple’s Siri & Spotlight Search Get Smarter

    dannysullivan
    by dannysullivan
    Sep 16, 2015
    The latest version of Apple’s iOS operating system is out today, iOS 9. It brings with it improvements to both Apple’s Siri personal assistant and its Spotlight search engine. Here’s a rundown of what’s new. Spotlight: Apple’s Stealth Search Engine

    Last year, Spotlight was improved to seek more than information just on your phone. That included gaining the name “Spotlight Search” when you pull down to conduct a search.

    Earlier this year, Jason Calacanis wrote a nice piece about how...

    How Google might Disambiguate Different Entities with the Same Names in Queries and Pages

    by Bill Slawski
    Sep 16, 2015
    Last year I wrote a post titled Google on Finding Entities: A Tale of Two Michael Jacksons. The post was about a Google patent that described how Google might tell different entities apart that shared the same name. The patent in it was filed in...

    Google Search Queries Report Goes Offline Today

    rustybrick
    by rustybrick
    Sep 16, 2015
    Zineb Ait Bahajji from Google announced on Google+ that the legacy Google Search Queries report within the Google Search Console is no longer going to work after today...

    Google: Internal Article Links To Your E-Commerce Products Is Not Over Optimization

    rustybrick
    by rustybrick
    Sep 15, 2015
    The concern over linking has not died down at all in recent months. A recent question submitted to Google's John Mueller over a Google+ Hangout asked about linking...

    Google: Structured Markup May Become A Ranking Factor

    rustybrick
    by rustybrick
    Sep 11, 2015
    I was shocked a bit to hear this, since Google has said time and time again that rich snippets and structured markup doesn't help your site rank higher in Google. But that might change in the future.

    Product vision + OKRs = Sustainable roadmap

    by Rian van der Merwe
    Sep 10, 2015
    I really love the product strategy direction Marty Cagan proposes in The Alternative to Roadmaps:

    Ensure your product organization has a compelling product vision.  Ensure that each product team has a clearly defined, prioritized set of business objectives.  Make sure any commitments that must be made are high-integrity commitments.

    This means that instead of prioritizing features (and the timing of those features), the leadership team prioritizes business objectives and problems...