Industry News

Jessica McKellar gives some fantastic career, management, and leadership advice in This Is What Impactful Engineering Leadership Looks Like. The interview goes into detail on three main areas:

“When engineering management is done right, you’re focusing on three big things,” she says. “You’re directly supporting the people on your team; you’re managing execution and coordination across teams; and you’re stepping back to observe and evolve the broader organization and its processes as...

Virginia Heffernan’s A Sucker Is Optimized Every Minute is a deeply cynical, extremely funny rant on our obsession with data:

These days, optimizers of squeeze pages, drawing lessons as much from the labcoats at Optimizely as from the big daddies at Google, recommend creating a three-to-10 minute video that’s introduced by a “magnetic headline” (“Find the Perfect Lampshade for Any Lamp”) and quickly chase it with an “information gap” like “You’re Not Going to Believe the Trick I Use...

The Google Mobile Friendly algorithm is coming soon, ready or not, we all know that. But how "significant" will this be for the mobile search results exactly? We know Google said it will be more visible than Panda or Penguin - they said that yesterday.
But Google won't say exactly how significant...

Google announced they have updated their ranking algorithm to detect a larger and better set of doorway pages and thus wipe them out of the search results, as to improve search quality within Google's search results...

In How do Smartphones Affect Human Thought? Jenny Davis addresses the recent research behind the “Smartphones are Making Us Stupid” narrative:

[The research] hypothesis implies (though does not state) a research question: How does smartphone usage affect cognitive processes? This is an important question, but one the research was never prepared to answer thoughtfully. Rather, the authors recast this question as a prediction, embedded in a host of assumptions which privilege unmediated...

Everyone is talking about the upcoming mobile friendly ranking factor coming up on April 21st for the mobile search results - but what is live already today as a ranking factor in Google mobile search is App Ranking...

On Tuesday, March 17, 2013 we are having a Lotico San Diego Semantic Web on the topic of SEO meets Semantic Web. It’s a free meetup and we have a number of people who have signed up to attend the lectures and network. We will be having Green...

Successful search engine optimization strategies must aggregate intent. This is something I touched on in my What Is SEO post and also demonstrated in my Rich Snippets Algorithm piece. But I want to talk about it in depth because it’s that important. Aggregating Intent

Many of Google’s Knowledge Cards aggregate intent. Here’s the Knowledge Card displayed when I search for ‘va de vi’.



Google knows that Va de Vi is a restaurant. But they don’t quite know what my intent is behind such...

I’ve been spending way more time with Google’s Material Design guidelines than I ever thought I would, but such is life.

Anyway, as I was going through it, and started to think about the Android side of an app I’m working on, I tweeted this:

Concerned about Material Design's reliance on label-less icons. Pretty sure most users don't know what these mean. pic.twitter.com/aH1IZvAyG6— Rian van der Merwe (@RianVDM) March 11, 2015

That screenshot is from the section on Icons in the...

Last time there was a big Penguin update by Google, i.e. Penguin 3.0, Google did not announce that it happened but they confirmed it after we asked about it.
Google's John Mueller implied they would do the same thing next time a Penguin algorithm is updated or refreshed.