Industry News

I’m increasingly conflicted about roundup posts. You know, the kind where 23 experts answer one burning question and their answers are all put together in one long blog post. Instant content! I don’t produce roundup posts, rarely read them and infrequently contribute to them. Roundup Dynamics



The dynamics of a roundup post are pretty clear. The person aggregating the answers gets what is essentially free content for their site. Yes, I know you had to email people and potentially...

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about how product design decisions aren’t neutral. The way we design a product has a direct effect on how people use it. This is obvious, but I think we often forget the real implication: Design wants something from its users. And we are the architects of those wants. We have a direct impact on user behavior, and we need to recognize the weight of that responsibility.

Let’s look at some recent product changes on Twitter as an example.

In...

A couple weeks ago we posted how Google's John Mueller said he would avoid link building in general, but in that, he said you can enable people to easily link to you by offering a widget or something.
John was asked about widgets for link building...

Rune Madsen wrote a really interesting post on how our design methods need to change when we work in software (as opposed to print). He explains in the post On meta-design and algorithmic design systems:

So what is meta-design? In a traditional design practice, the designer works directly on a design product. Be it a logo, website, or a set of posters, the designer is the instrument to produce the final artifact. A meta-designer works to distill this instrumentation into a design...

It seems like Google may be testing a new label in the search results for slow sites. K Neeraj Kayastha posted a screen shot of the "Slow" label in a Google+ community and said he spotted this on his Android device searching in incognito mode...

Google announced a significant update to how they enable business owners to manage the photos of their business within their Google+ Business Profiles.

Google said:

Starting today...

Can you believe it has been four years since the Google officially released their Panda algorithm update? Before that, Google was getting a tremendous amount of flack over the quality of their search results and then Panda touched down.
Panda 1.0 was released on February 24, 2011 - four years ago today and it may have been the most significant quality algorithm Google has released to date, even more so than Penguin.

Remember last week, many many sites noticed their site was labeled with this site may be hacked warnings in Google Search...

Back in September 2011, Google News introduced the standout tag, a way for publishers to say these specific stories are really exceptional and Google News readers should really see it.
But did you know...