Industry News

The example for the post I was writing for today appears to have been hijacked by the Simpsons. They made an apology to Judas Priest, after referring to the band as a death metal band. The image below is from a Guardian news article on the apology...

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There are a lot of articles recently telling us that SEO is “just marketing” now. SEO is dead, “finished” or only makes sense as part of digital, internet, inbound or content marketing. I’m really tired of reading this cliché. There are two reasons for that: I consider myself an optimizer not a marketer. marketing is only a small subset of optimization.

Optimization means improvement. Marketing means bringing something to a market.  I guess this sounds very much like abstract...

I’m excited to be part of Industry Web Conference in April this year, alongside some people I’ve admired for a long time. I’m going to be talking about a thing that’s fallen out of fashion a little bit over the past year or so: Deliverables. Yep — the business we’re supposed to be getting out of. So I’m a bit nervous about the talk, but I hope people will give it a chance.

The talk is called Getting back into the (right) deliverables business, and here’s a little more about it:

I feel...

In Product Kyle Neath asks:

We are focused on likes, app opens, hours spent, pageviews, and company valuations — but do these translate to a better future? Are we using ads to provide for a connected humanity, or conning people into conspicuous consumption? It’s hard to judge. I do know that it just feels right when you build a good product. [...]

That’s really the core of it: how can we create financially sustainable products that bring people joy and make the world a better...

Thousands of hotels listed within Google+ Local appear to have had links leading to their official sites “hijacked” and replaced with ones leading to third-party booking services. Google+ Local listings are what Google depends on to provide results in Google Maps or Google Search, when people look for local businesses. A Hijacked URL

For example, here is the “verified” page for the Courtyard Marriott in Sherman Oaks, California:



The arrows show how the URLs for the hotel’s official...

News came out in a Google Press release yesterday, Google to Acquire Nest, that Google had purchased Nest, a company focused on connecting things found in your home to the internet, including the Nest Learning Thermostat, and recently released...

On January 9th we reported on early chatter of a Google update, which has now grown to almost 200 comments. Early on, the chatter was slow but now, over the past couple days...

First spotted via Hacker News, Bing now has enabled searchers to go to https://www.bing.com and search over Bing SSL search.

I covered this at Search Engine Land where I said early tests show that when on SSL search...

Poorna Bell’s So Long, FOMO is making the rounds today:

At nearly every restaurant table I saw, there was at least one person (if not most) who spent most of their time taking photos or video to put on Facebook later, or searching for something on the internet, or playing games or just checking for texts. For more and more of us, technology is taking over, invading even our most personal and private of moments.

This idea that technology is turning us into antisocial monkeys is getting...