Industry News

Last night on This Week In Google on TWIT.TV, Matt Cutts was a guest.
Before the show, Leo Laporte, the host, asked Matt Cutts about his leave with Google and Matt Cutts said (on the non recorded part) that Google was nice enough to extend his leave until the end of this year. He said later on in the recorded part

Are click through rates on search results a ranking signal? The idea is that if the third result on a page is clicked more often than the first that it will, over time, rise to the second or first result.

I remember this question being asked numerous times when I was just starting out in the industry. Google representatives employed a potent combination of tap dancing and hand waving when asked directly. They were so good at doing this that we stopped hounding them and over the last few...

Tonight, I am joining Barbara Starr in giving a two Person Presentation in San Diego, at the Courtyard San Diego in Old Town, titled Ranking in Google Since the Advent of the Knowledge Graph.

The presentation is a meetup cohosted by a few...

On June 17th, we reported about a Google update, Google later confirmed the update as being part of their core algorithm and not related to Panda or Penguin or even HTTPS.
Marcus Tober provided some really interesting insight into this update basically showing how sites with news or fresh content seemed

Google offers a dedicated Google Video search designed to bring back videos from across the web, in addition to its own YouTube service. However, something seems seriously wrong with Google Video. Some searches promising to lead people to video content fail to actually do so.

Here’s an example using Apple:



In this case, I searched for “Apple” on Google, then selected “More” and then used the “Videos” option. The results are the same as if I went to Google Videos directly. Both the...

As if feature prioritization isn’t hard enough, many companies are starting to introduce another tricky variable into the mix: remote teams. If you’re a product manager who spends a lot of time on video calls with team members in different parts of the world, you’ll be forgiven for feeling like involving the team in prioritization is too much to deal with. But don’t give up on the dream yet. One of the teams on a project I’m working on is very much distributed, and I think we may have found...

A mural in Carlsbad, Ca.

On Tuesday, June 23, 2015. Barbara Starr and I are giving a two person Presentation to the SEO San Diego Meetup, SEM San Diego Meetup, and Lotico Semantic Web San Diego Meetup Groups, titled Ranking in Google Since The...

As expected, Google has finally dropped the Emoji characters from displaying in the Google search results. Although it took them several more weeks than expected...

It has been 267 days since the last Panda update. That’s 8 months and 25 days.

Where’s My Panda Update?

Obviously I’m a bit annoyed that there hasn’t been a Panda update in so long because I have a handful of clients who might (fingers crossed) benefit from having it deployed. They were hit and they’ve done a great deal of work cleaning up their sites so that they might get back into Google’s good graces.

I’m not whining about it (much). That’s the way the cookie crumbles and...

Google has announced that in the coming weeks, it will launch a system allowing people to request nude and explicit images of themselves posted without consent from appearing in Google’s search results.

This move will help with the “revenge porn” issue, where upset partners post images to degrade someone they were with. It’s an issue that’s especially likely to be done to women.

Google wrote of the new policy today in a blog post:

We’ve heard many troubling stories of “revenge...