Industry News

Over the last few months, I’ve been running some experiments in Google’s search engine and on social media platforms with friends & colleagues. The results have been really exciting to see, but the more I invest in these efforts, the more I perceive that our small group is not enough. To truly validate, repeat, and scale the kinds of experiments we want to perform, we need help – we need a cooperative.

Hopefully, that’s where you come in From a recent test of anchor text’s influence on...

It seems Google has gone after yet another guest blog network that is being used by SEOs for link building purposes. The link network is named PostJoint and has gone on record that they are different from MyBlogGuest, which was penalized a month ago.

I love this quote from Suzanne Slatcher, who worked at Pixar in the early years. From the really interesting article Building The Next Pixar:

“Business is just an idea, like a movie,” says Slatcher. “What if we did this in this place at this time, in this style of packaging, with this choice of flavors? Would it work? There’s still a back and forth between creative and the audience, and you can’t be like ‘if I build it, they will come.’ No, we’re in a democratic world where everyone has...

I’m a big fan of sketching, and this post by Jacob Rader does a great job of explaining why it’s such an important part of the design process:

Sensemaking is the active conversation we have with the events that we encounter; it’s our ability to take in information, process it, and derive meaning and action from it.

Rather than focusing on the external, sketching provides us a sensemaking process for our own creative flux. When we’re presented with a problem our minds go to work to...

Geraldine and I don’t have kids, but for some reason, the last few months, I’ve spent innumerable conversations talking to our many friends with children about the tradeoffs of public vs. private schooling. As is my nature, I couldn’t help but research the topic on the web. And in nearly every piece I read, the same few messages emerge: Private education and Ivy League Schools are correlated with higher incomes in the job market (but if students’ socioeconomic backgrounds are controlled for,...

Google's Matt Cutts released a video on the topic of some of the largest SEO myths out today.

He broke it down into two categories:

(1) Ads and their influence on organic results.

(2) Quick fixes to break Google's algorithm.

On the ads from...

Apparently Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer wants to be the default search for Apple’s Safari browser on iPhone and iPad and has been preparing to make a solid pitch. Well, we all want things we can’t have, and I’d be incredibly surprised if Yahoo got its wish here.

Kara Swisher over at Re/code has the scoop, in her Marissa Mayer’s Secret Plan to Get Apple to Dump Google and Default to Yahoo Mobile Search story. Be sure to read that. Here, I’m going to share the incredibly tough list of obstacles...