Industry News

At SMX West last week, Google's Paul Haahr, a top engineer involved in core ranking, had a keynote Q&A with Danny Sullivan. He said many interesting things including that Google doesn't fully quiet understand RankBrain...

After a nearly 10-year absence, the Google Dance — Google’s annual gathering for search marketers — happened once again at the main Google campus last week.

About 500 people, attendees at our SMX search marketing conference, traveled by bus from the conference venue in San Jose to the Googleplex in Mountain View for the three-and-a-half hour event.

Arriving on the campus, they were given Google Dance t-shirts (something I never thought I’d see again), drinks, light snacks and a chance...

I’ve done a fair bit of hand-wringing about wireframes myself (see here and here), so I read Travis LaFleur’s Toward a More Expansive View of Wireframes with great interest. I really like Travis’s approach of expanding wireframes beyond their traditional use:

Rather than thinking of the wireframe as a low-fidelity, grayscale snapshot of what a page will eventually look like, coming further and further into focus as the design is refined, we can embrace a broader view of the wireframe...

Last week, Wednesday night during SMX West, Google brought back the Google Dance. It has been several years since Google hosted the event and it finally returned!

Google has said it will begin next week to censor content worldwide that it removes under the European Union’s Right To Be Forgotten mandate. But “worldwide” censorship will only apply to those searching from a particular EU country where the request was originally made. How The Censorship Works

Does that make your head hurt? This might help. Assume that someone in Germany files a Right To Be Forgotten request to have some listing removed for their name. If granted, the censorship will...

Yesterday at SMX West in the How Google Works: A Google Ranking Engineer's Story session Gary Illyes of Google was asked about the Penguin 4.0 update...

Charles Duhigg has a long feature in the New York Times called What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team. It includes a summary of really fascinating research on the core elements of a healthy, productive team:

As the researchers studied the groups, however, they noticed two behaviors that all the good teams generally shared. First, on the good teams, members spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as “equality in distribution...

Kevin Slavin’s Design as Participation is one of those articles that stays with you for days. There are multiple ways to read it, but I view it as a thoughtful critique of my primary field of focus: user-centered design (UCD). There have been other discussions on this topic, most notably Cennydd Bowles’s excellent Looking Beyond User-Centered Design, and Mike Long’s Stop Designing for Users. Kevin’s is a worthy addition to the debate.

Kevin’s main thesis is that UCD is selfish (since it...

In the past 24-hours or so, I've been seeing some early signs of a possible Google update. It might be impacting a limit number of sites or it might be the start of something...