Industry News

We've been covering all the confusion around Penguin and Panda about it being real time or manual. I explained based on covering John Mueller's explanation of what is real time and what is not over here...

Emily Badger wrote a very interesting article on the politics of sunlight and shade in urban design. From In the shadows of booming cities, a tension between sunlight and prosperity:

For cities, shadows present both a technical challenge — one that can be modeled in 3-D and measured in “theoretical annual sunlight hours” lost — and an ethereal one. They change the feel of space and the value of property in ways that are hard to define. They’re a stark reminder that the new growth...

Andrew Thompson in Engineers of Addiction, a fascinating profile on the psychology of slot machines:

Game [slot machine] designers are charged with somehow summoning the ineffable allure of electronic spectacle — developing a system that is both simple and endlessly engaging, a machine to pull and trap players into a finely tuned cycle of risk and reward that keeps them glued to the seat for hours, their pockets slowly but inevitably emptying.

In other words, their job...

Thomas Schranz writes in Product / Market Fit is a Trap:

Obsessing about product/market fit is a huge waste of your time. Yes … waste of your time. There … I said it again. […]

As I said above you don’t want to focus on product/market fit. You want to focus on building a great product and on getting it into the hands of your customers.

First, let’s talk about tone. I’m pretty averse to absolute language like “it’s a trap” and “it’s a waste of time.” Things are rarely that...

It has been a while since we reported on any wide spread, mass scale, Google manual actions but it seems like over the weekend...

Steven Hoober has some great guidelines for touchscreen design in Fingers, thumbs, and people:

Most of all, within what you can control: Always design for hands, fingers, and thumbs.

And remember: You don’t design for iPhone or Android, for cars or kiosks, for Web or apps, but for people. Have empathy for users and respect their choices, their ways of working. Account for the limits of their lives, their environments and their abilities.

Even when your implementation...

For many, the Google mobile friendly algorithm was a let down. It is fully rolled out but many still don't see any significant impact, nothing at the scale of Panda or Penguin from the SEO/webmaster point of view.
Google's John Mueller was asked this by a webmaster (I think wearing a bathrobe) this morning at...

An interesting counter-argument to the #noestimates movement—and a call for reasonable software development estimates—on the Clever PM blog1. From In Defense of Estimates:

From a business perspective, some level of estimation is absolutely required, so that judgment calls can be made as to priorities of execution and communications within the company and to customers. We need to have some level of understanding of whether something is “bigger than an elephant or smaller than a...

It is now official, Google has rolled out the new Search Analytics Report too all webmasters within Google Webmaster Tools. Google said they will keep the old Search Queries report for three months and then sunset it...