Industry News

A few years ago, I presented at SES San Jose and someone asked me what they should be keeping an eye upon in SEO. I told them “named entities.” I was reminded of that conversation as I gave a talk today about named entities and other semantics. I...

Matt Cutts has a boss, it is Amit Singhal - he is in charge of all of search and he posted on Google+ looking back at the past 14 years of him working there, including the IPO which was 10 years ago today...

Alvin Hsia’s What I Learned In My First Year as a Product Designer is a good refresher and reminder about what’s important when working with others. This point is worth discussing further:

Make a deliberate effort to cultivate empathy for other team functions and be able to explain your designs to whoever it is you’re talking to, in their terms. It’s ok to use design jargon as long as you’re able to educate others on what the impressive-sounding words you use actually mean. Break down...

Yesterday morning, @gfiorelli1 notified me of that Google has "launched a massive amount of links manual penalization emails" specifically in Spain...

On August 6th, Google announced that https was becoming a ranking signal for Google Search. I’m not completely sure of the implications of a discovery I made earlier today yet, but I noticed at the USPTO assignment database that Google had been...

We know it has been over 10 months since Google launched a Penguin update and Google explained it is complicated to just refresh it.
But this morning, in a Google+ Hangout, John Mueller kind of hinted that it is coming really soon. He talked about it at 21 minutes and 40 seconds into the video. He said "engineers are working on" and admits it has "been quiet a while" but said it is "not that far away" but it is "not launching this morning." But are you sure? Maybe this afternoon? Google likes launching these larger algorithms late Friday afternoons.

Jennifer Slegg posted an interesting case of a manual action being revoked and then the same day reappearing and then being revoked again. Interestingly enough...

I’ve been saying for at least a couple of years that Google’s local search is a proof of concept for the search giant to use on how to find and understand entities. With local search, Google goes out and looks for a mention of a business on the Web,...

Google has quietly updated their Webmaster Guidelines, the little or no original content section. They added a example reference there for "low-quality guest blog posts." I would not be surprised to see manual actions for guest blogging, not link specific, but content specific penalties.