Industry News

Reuters reported over the weekend that Facebook has dropped their Microsoft Bing partnership to power the web search results within Facebook search.

Facebook has stopped including results from Microsoft Bing search engine on its social networking site...

A couple of mornings each week I drive down to my local Peet’s for some coffee. There’s a barista there named Courtney who is referred to by her co-workers as the Michael Jordan of baristas. Why? She can remember the names and orders for a vast number of customers.

“Both today AJ?” she asks me as I walk over to the counter.

“Yes, thank you,” I reply and with that I’ve ordered a extra hot 2% medium latte and a non-fat flat large latte.

This is a comforting experience. It’s a bit like...

We've been seeing an incredible amount of activity around sites impacted by Google's Penguin algorithm over the past few weeks, smack inside the busiest holiday shopping season...

Representatives from Google announced recently that they would no longer be updating the PageRank toolbar signals for web pages. Google had been updating those 3-4 times a year for over a decade. Does this news indicate that Google is no longer...

There are some wonderful and surprising stories in Ian Urbina’s The Secret Life of Passwords:

SEVERAL YEARS AGO I began asking my friends and family to tell me their passwords. I had come to believe that these tiny personalized codes get a bum rap. Yes, I understand why passwords are universally despised: the strains they put on our memory, the endless demand to update them, their sheer number. I hate them, too. But there is more to passwords than their annoyance. In our authorship of...

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When the Web is a series of tubes SEO experts are just the plumbers of it.

Just cleaning up and fixing things only gets you so far.

What about creative SEO practices everybody can implement beyond just fine tuning? Optimization is also about actively improving things.

 

Fixing things is the foundation

When you look at what some SEO practitioners do most of the time you may notice that the scope of tasks they work on is pretty limited. They are mostly fixing sites and links....

It looks like Google is now rolling out the mobile friendly labels globally and in all languages...

There are a few controversial ideas in Benjamin Sandofsky’s You Can’t Go Home Again, in which he basically says that Agile methodologies shouldn’t be used in mobile app development. I did find this perspective on QA interesting in our increasingly post-QA world:

Sit down with a software engineer from anywhere but the web, and ask them about QA. Tell a game developer you don’t need it, they’ll tell you you’re nuts. Maybe these agile people have been burned by bad QA, but a great QA team...

Dan Lockton’s As we may understand is unnecessarily long and rambling at times, but it’s still worth it for the very interesting views on the Internet of Things and designing for behavior change:

Many of the issues with the ‘behaviour change’ phenomenon can be characterised as deficiencies in inclusion: the extent to which people who are the ‘targets’ of the behaviour change are included in the design process for those ‘interventions’ (this terminology itself is inappropriate), and the...