Industry News

Yesterday, Google's Matt Cutts announced on Twitter that they have pushed out a refresh to the Google Page Layout algorithm on or around February 6th.
He did not specify how much this impacted the search results but based on my analysis of the SEO community, it had a very small impact on most SEOs.
This would be the third update...

Flappy Bird — that insufferable iOS game — has been in the news quite a bit recently. One of the more incensed “reviews” comes from Paul Tassi’s Winged Fury:

Flappy Bird is not a game. It’s an addictive collection of pixels you don’t win, you simply play until you’re frustrated enough to delete it. And yet, it’s tapped into some primal sense of accomplishment for this, the attention-deficit world we live in. Have nothing to do for more than a few moments? Whip out your phone and flap your...

First Yandex, now Bing, has beaten Google to offer Bitcoin conversion prices. Bing has announced that people can find the current rates by doing a search on Bing.

Bing shared the news in a blog post today. It can be triggered in various ways, such as asking “one dollar in bitcoin,” which yielded this answer: Yandex rolled out a similar BitCoin conversion feature in December. Like Bing, it uses pricing from the  Coindesk Bitcoin Calculator. WolframAlpha also offers Bitcoin conversion, having...

Last time I have written about Google on this blog I promised to be more positive about the search-monopolist mega-corporation advertising company. You know, it’s not easy for me after all the issues I had with Google. Nonetheless this time I decided to write an endearing article.

For years, maybe even a decade, Google has been explaining to business owners interested in search engine optimization services that you have to

“Beware of SEOs that (…) allege a “special relationship” with...

I’ve been thinking about this whole “being online” thing quite a bit over the past week or so, so James Shelley’s The Overinflated Currency of Personal Brands struck quite a chord:

What happens when the fame contagion infects an entire society? [American historian Daniel Boorstin] speculated that “The quest for celebrity, the pressure for well-knownness, everywhere makes the worker overshadow the work.” Increasingly we will go about our lives and work not actually concerned with the...

Many words found on a web page are much easier to understand given the context of the page itself, as described in a Google patent granted last week. For example, take the word “bank,” which can mean a financial institution, one side of a river, or...

Be careful what you wish for. In this case, the French privacy agency CNiL demanded that Google link from the Google France home page to a privacy ruling made against it. Google complied — and now the traffic seems to have slowed and sometimes crashed the CNiL web site.

Our story on Marketing Land has more about the statement that Google was ordered to post saying that it was found to violate French privacy rules: Google France Home Page Now Carries Privacy Violation Notice, As Ordered....

Last night, the spam czar of Google, Matt Cutts tweeted the expected, that they penalized a German link network.

This time, Cutts did not call out which network, instead he said Google went after a Germany agency and their clients over their link network...

If you had any doubts over how Google feels about Russia’s legislation against gay “propaganda,” just go the Google home page. The company has started what will be a string of special logos for the Olympics with one that includes a quote stressing that the official Olympic Charter is against discrimination and using the colors of the rainbow gay pride flag. The logo is shown above, along with a quote from the Olympic Charter, which says: “The practice of sport is a human right. Every...