Industry News

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...

Here is the monthly recap for all Google webmaster related topics for the past month. January was a pretty wild month with a pretty big update happening on January 8th and 9th, which Google did not confirm...

Content is powerful. It helps websites and companies earn traffic, earn amplification through social media, build trust with an audience, all at a cost far lower than traditional or online paid marketing channels. But, sometime in the next few years, I’m worried that it may become a more challenging, more risky, and less dividend-paying investment.

The problem is (or will be) content fatigue. And we’ve no one to blame but ourselves:
I strongly suspect that the impressions vs. clicks of...

Google’s finally reached a proposed agreement with the European Union over antitrust charges. Judging from screenshots the EU has released, it will give Google rivals unprecedented positioning in Google’s results, sometimes for free, sometimes for a fee.

Consider how the EU is saying that shopping results will appear, as part of the agreement. The before:

And the after, based on screenshots that the EU has released:

In the after, you can see an “Alternatives” section that gives...