Industry News

Catch up on interesting new discussion and industry news.

    How Bing May Expand Queries Based upon Finding Entities Within them

    by Bill Slawski
    Apr 3, 2015
    “Examples of entity graphs include Microsoft Corporation’s Satori and Google’s Knowledge Graph, or Facebook’s semantic graph.” A Microsoft patent application was published at the World Intellectual Property Organization this week on Semantic...

    Google Mobile-Friendly Algorithm Will Not Impact Tablet Searches

    rustybrick
    by rustybrick
    Apr 3, 2015
    Believe it or not, there is still confusion around the upcoming mobile-friendly algorithm that Google is pushing live on April 21st.
    The algorithm will only impact searches done on smartphones - only. This does not impact desktop searches and it does not impact tablet searches.
    Want proof?

    Understanding and Applying Moz's Spam Score Metric - Whiteboard Friday

    Apr 2, 2015
    This week, Moz released a new feature that we call Spam Score, which helps you analyze your link profile and weed out the spam (check out the blog post for more info). There have been some fantastic conversations about how it works and how it should (and shouldn't) be used, and we wanted to clarify a few things to help you all make the best use of the tool.

    In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand...

    [Basics of a mobile website for SMBs] 4. Set it right: Redirects and canonicals

    Apr 2, 2015
    4. Set it right: Redirects and canonicals* Join us for a 4-part web series on making great mobile sites for your small and medium businesses....

    Google AdWords Verification Policy For Phone Numbers In Call Extensions

    rustybrick
    by rustybrick
    Apr 2, 2015
    Google launched call extensions about four years ago within the Google AdWords advertising platform. Prior, you could list any phone number you want...

    Google's New Head Of Search Quality Is Me

    rustybrick
    by rustybrick
    Apr 1, 2015
    This is not easy for me to announce, being that I've been covering Google and search quality here for well over ten years. It is both sad as well as exciting for me to tell you the news --- I am going to be taking over the role of Google's head of search quality today...

    My next project: AutoSEO

    MattCutts
    by MattCutts
    Mar 31, 2015
    I’ve been working really hard with some friends on a project to handle SEO automatically. Now we’re ready to take the wraps off it over at seo.ninja.

    One of the ideas that helped the World Wide Web succeed was that it separated presentation and content. You could write your text and decouple it from the problem of how the text looked. AutoSEO takes that to the next stage with search engines, so you don’t have to think about things like redirects.

    How much would you pay to never have to...

    Don’t stop believing (in user research)

    by Rian van der Merwe
    Mar 31, 2015
    I’m having a hard time with Alex Schleifer’s (Airbnb’s head of design) proclamations in Why Airbnb’s New Head of Design Believes ‘Design-Led’ Companies Don’t Work. There are a lot of sweeping generalizations in the article, but I’ll focus on one specific part — user-centered design. First, this:

    The solution Schleifer and CEO Brian Chesky devised actually deemphasizes the designers. The point, Schleifer says, isn’t to create a “design-led culture,” because that tends to tell anyone...

    Did Wikipedia Take An Organic Hit In Google Search?

    rustybrick
    by rustybrick
    Mar 31, 2015
    Wikipedia has historically dominated Google's search results - no one would argue with that.
    But now with the knowledge graph, does Google have a need to rank Wikipedia at the top, when instead

    Usability testing and agile, together

    by Rian van der Merwe
    Mar 30, 2015
    I really like the approach described in Jen McGinn and Ana Ramírez Chang’s RITE+Krug: A Combination of Usability Test Methods for Agile Design. It’s a dense paper, but worth your time. Here’s a key part (my emphasis added):

    Prior to using the RITE+Krug combination, the user research process and results had been divorced from the Agile processes, which resulted in the findings coming too late to be acted on. Because of this issue, we integrated the user research with the rest of the...