Industry News

Andy Beaumont wrote a great piece about his popular Tab Closed; Didn’t Read Tumblr site, which documents websites that obscure their content behind modal overlays. His point on analytics in The Value of Content is spot on:

Analytics only tell you part of the story — if that’s all you bother to find out, and you have absolute faith in those numbers, then you’re going to end up putting a modal overlay on your site. Analytics will tell you that you got more “conversions”. Analytics will show...

It sounds pretty damning. Two recent surveys suggest that Google Shopping isn’t leading searchers to the best prices on products. But the surveys weren’t well documented, nor did they include competitors like Bing, Shopzilla, PriceGrabber and Nextag, which have similar issues. So, Search Engine Land will be running its own fully documented tests. Every few days, we’ll search for an item and show what we found, starting with today’s test, a search for a toaster. How Much Is That Toaster In The...

It was a pretty busy month for Google over the last 30 days or so. We had a few ranking changes going on at Google. All of them were unconfirmed by Google.
We also had...

Google's Matt Cutts posted a video yesterday explaining that "stitching content" is a bad idea. In short, stitching content is when you take snippets from various articles across the web and place it on a single page...

There are a few pieces on the topic of what makes a design good that jumped out at me recently. First, I like this approach from Uday Gajendar in What is good design?:

So what is “good design”? It’s an attitude of design-driven excellence (from strategy to delivery), a process of iteration and creativity, a mentality of enabling humanistic achievement for people, and a value system grounded in excellence of craft with a magnanimous bent towards what’s best for customers: appropriate,...

It is possible that there may be a Bing Search update happening now - although Bing updates are always much harder to track.

WebmasterWorld and HighRankings Forum both have webmasters noticing changes in rankings at Bing since the weekend...

I see these threads all the time, a webmaster complaining their rankings suddenly dropped and for no reason.

Well, Google's John Mueller responded to one of these...

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Apple has purchased Topsy, one of the leading Twitter search and analytics companies, for more than $200 million.

The WSJ report says that Apple has confirmed the deal but wouldn’t comment more beyond this statement: Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.

Topsy is about the only decent third-party Twitter search service to have survived, in recent years.

Google had a...