Industry News

The co-founder of Moz, Rand Fishkin, posted on Twitter and also on the Moz blog that one of the YouMoz, the user generated content portion of Moz, contributors received a Google Manual action for a link violation and it cited an article posted on YouMoz.

With Google's Matt Cutts taking an extended vacation, I wanted to know, who at Google will take the blame for new algorithms being released.

Typically when big updates are announced...

For years I've used a combination of StumbleUpon and Google Remarketing to cheaply and efficiently open the top of the funnel for start-ups.

I don't hear much about this tactic (though perhaps I'm not looking in the right places) so here's a little explanation on this handy growth hack. StumbleUpon



You remember StumbleUpon right? A darling of the Web 1.0 world, it was purchased by eBay in 2007 where it was largely ignored until it was bought back in 2009. It doesn't get a lot of press...

Microsoft’s new predictive search agent Cortana is finally becoming available to the general public. How does it compare to longstanding champion Google Now? After months of using them both, it’s no contest. Google Now easily wins, in my daily life. But Cortana does gives Microsoft an important foundation in the predictive search space and puts it well ahead of Apple’s own Siri. Welcome, Cortana

Microsoft announced that Cortana would be part of Windows Phone 8.1 earlier this year....

In a Google Webmaster Hangout from a week ago on Google+, John Mueller of Google was presented with a question on why some brands rank so well within the Knowledge Graph on Google.
Here are two examples...

In Doomed to Repeat It Paul Ford discusses our obsession with email and to-do list apps, and he makes an interesting point about this form of communication that we all love to hate:

Is there another form of communication besides email where the acknowledged goal is to hide all of the communication? Email has evolved into a weird medium of communication where the best thing you can do is destroy it quickly, as if every email were a rabid bat attacking your face. Yet even the tragically...

The AP is increasingly starting to use software with no human intervention to write basic news stories, but Kevin Roose says that we shouldn’t be alarmed about it. From his article Why Robot Journalism Is Great for Journalists:

Robot assistance may even spur human reporters to do our jobs better. With software producing the equivalent of old-school “clip files” for us, we’ll essentially have full-time research assistants. The information in our stories will be more accurate, since it...

As a frequent flyer I started reading Michaeleen Doucleff’s How To Stay Healthy In Flight with great interest, but I cannot get this sentence out of my head:

In 2004, the Environmental Protection Agency found high levels of fecal bacteria in the drinking water of 15 of the 327 planes it tested.

Ummm…

Rich Mironov’s We Don’t Hire Product Owners Here is a treasure trove of advice and clear thinking on the dangers of not taking the Product Owner role seriously in companies that make the switch to Agile development. There are so many good sound bites, but I’ll stick with this just one, which hits close to home:

Don’t let your customer request list become your roadmap. Kano analysis teaches us that letting current customers prioritize your backlog for you leads to market failure.  Don’t...

I don’t quite know how to describe Peter Richardson’s The Lay of the Land. It’s about topography, maps, and cartoons, but actually about how we see the world:

Eventually I escaped my fjord, but a few lessons of my youth have been repeatedly confirmed: topography is important, and there’s no faster way to make an impression than with a cartoon. And by “cartoon” I mean a simplification which exaggerates some details and omits others. You could also say “model,” but I like the connotations...