Industry News

I recently read an article by George Nielsen on SEJournal entitled What are SEOs Even Good At Anymore?

It struck me that this is a topic about which many folks in and around web marketing professions are curious about. With some of the recent changes Google’s made around link building practices, brand biasing, and intent matching. And, since my opinions on the topic are unique from Mr. Nielsen’s I thought I’d share. Here’s how Nielsen opened: “Our ‘secrets and techniques’ no longer work and...

A Google Webmaster Help thread has someone complaining that his site's rankings dropped and the one thing he noticed was that his home page and 56 other pages are indexed in Google with the https version...

John Foreman digs into Disney’s MagicBands in his article You don’t want your privacy — Disney and the meat space data race:

Disney World is like a petri dish for advanced analytic techniques because the hotels and parks are all tied together in one large, heavily controlled environment. If you ever wanted to star in The Truman Show, a trip to Disney is the next best thing — it feels like a centrally planned North Korea only with more fun, less torture and the same amount of artifice....

Yesterday we broke the news that Google added that you should not block Google ads within the technical requirements within Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

It seems Google has pulled the new line completely from their guidelines...

It’s been big news recently about major brands and Google penalties, and the floodgates feel open on people spotting even more brands possibly hit out there. Some new crackdown by Google? No. It’s the rise of hyperactive attention in this area, and that’s turning into a problem. Hence this open letter, on how we’re planning to address “public penalty reports” here at Search Engine Land. In Summary: Penalties Aren’t Always Newsworthy

The TL;DR is this. We’re not going to be writing about...

Great article by Zach Holman on startup growth, hiring, and culture:

I think a number of startups end up reaching some type of blindness as they grow and reach success. They are the same companies whose founders are college dropouts, but now that they’re a hundred employees they decide to follow Google’s model and recruit exclusively from top five-ranked schools. They are the same companies that hire a monoculture, not realizing that their success stemmed in part from the oddball founding...

On April 9th, 2009, many people developed an interest in speeding up their websites, after reading a post on the Google Webmaster Central Blog – Using site speed in web search ranking.



On the same day, Google’s Matt Cutts published Google...

A new update has been made to the Google webmaster guidelines document, which describes you should not block the Google ads destination URL with your robots.txt file.
The new text is under...

There is a tremendous amount of chatter going on about Google updating over the past couple days or so at WebmasterWorld.

On February 6th we had the Page Layout algorithm update but that didn't cause much of a fuss in the SEO forums. But something over the past couple days is...