Industry News

Monday we covered how John Mueller of Google said that going mobile only is fine, in that Google will index the mobile only site and rank it just fine both on mobile and even on desktop...

Gary Illyes from Google said on Twitter this morning that any SEO "recommending against going HTTPS" is doing the wrong thing and not only are they technically wrong, they also "should feel bad...

In Design Thinking Comes of Age Jon Kolko describes one of the biggest (and most important) shifts we’re starting to see in enterprise software:

To build empathy with users, a design-centric organization empowers employees to observe behavior and draw conclusions about what people want and need. Those conclusions are tremendously hard to express in quantitative language. Instead, organizations that “get” design use emotional language (words that concern desires, aspirations,...

We know Google can check if a site is penalized or not. Google has told webmasters in real time if they are penalized many many times.

We even saw what Google calls the Google Penalty Server...

Google has been showing Knowledge panels in response to queries where Google recognizes an entity within that query, and Google has collected enough information about that entity for it to display a knowledge panel about the entity. I’ve written...

From October of 2004 to April of 2015, Moz’s website remained entirely mobile-unfriendly. The experience on mobile, tablet, and desktop devices was the same, and if your screen was small, you had to pinch and zoom. Many of our readers complained and many more wondered why a technology company in the web marketing field would de-prioritize such a crucial element of user experience.

The answer in this case was a matter of prioritization and resources. Moz’s internal team that handles our...

Jessica Harllee’s Sharing Our Work: Testing and Feedback in Design is a great article on different ways to get user feedback on designs:

To help choose our path, we create low-fidelity mockups and do concept testing with Etsy users who fit the target audience for the project. Rather than invest a lot of engineering time up front on building something we might not use, we often test clickable prototypes, which, while clunky, are cheap to create and involve zero engineering time....

Google's Gary Illyes said on Twitter that he'd love to make a new negative search engine ranking factor at Google for interstitials.

It is no surprise that Google, as a whole, dislikes interstitials...

Can Google use social media, like Google+ to improve the quality of reviews it shows for products and services? Google does like to show reviews to searchers, possibly because many searchers ask for reviews.

A Google patent application...

In May, Google began showing Twitter listings within its mobile search results within the US. Now it looks like those might be coming to desktop and beyond the US.

The folks at Conductor tipped Search Engine Land to Twitter integration showing up in Google’s desktop results in the UK. Here’s an example:



Conductor tells us they’ve spotted this integration for several celebrities and large brands, but only when checking results within the UK.

We can’t replicate the results, but it...