Industry News

Maiz Lulkin has a great overview of one of the most important and most misunderstood issues in software development in his post Technical debt 101:

In software development, the dreadful consequences of sacrificing quality are widely misunderstood by non technical managers. They underestimate how detrimental it is to continued productivity and morale, and ultimately, to the overall strategy of the company.

He goes on to explain why…

Back in May we reported that eBay had some sort of penalty that hit their Google search visibility by about 50%. That is major but now we somewhat know how major.

Danny Sullivan reports on Search Engine Land that it may have costed them $200 million...

Earlier this year, eBay was hit with a search penalty by Google. The loss of traffic resulting from that has been noticeable enough that eBay acknowledged it in a financial call this week, suggesting it may have cost up to $200 million in revenue. eBay also said it plans to improve its efforts in paid search, something that was underway even before it hit a penalty — and a seeming rejection of an eBay research report that paid search doesn’t work well. eBay’s Google Problem

On the earnings...

Over the past few weeks, we've covered the topic of a possible Sandbox 2.0 Google algorithm targeting churn and burn web sites.
I decided to bring it up in a Google Hangout with Google's John Mueller a couple days ago and you can see his response to my question starting at about...

Google announced that they've updated the Robots.txt tester tool within Google Webmaster Tools. The tool adds three things; highlights, testing and revision history.

In a Google hangout yesterday with Google's John Mueller, John explained that Google updates their data for manual actions within Google Webmaster Tools twice a day on average and then only sends out emails once a day on average with notices.

Ashley Feinberg in Razr Burn — My Month With 2004′s Most Exciting Phone:

It may be hard to remember now—or to believe at all, if you’re under 20—but at the time of its release the Razr was the final word in mobile technology. For the first time, you got a sleek, powerful, and wildly expensive bit of metal to call not only your cellphone but your status symbol, too. A couple of years and a few slashes into the $700 price tag later, you could barely go outside without seeing someone flip...

Google announced that if you conduct a Google search on your iOS or Android device and a site that comes up is built in Flash technology...

I’m not sure if I should really link to Kids Don’t Care About Cars because there are very few things more annoying than old people pontificating about what “youngsters” like and don’t like. Still, this part did get me thinking:

The basic premise is you’ve got to go. How you get there is irrelevant. Furthermore, the costs of car ownership… the insurance and the gas, never mind the maintenance, none of them appeal to a youngster who believes all costs should be baked in.

I’m not...