Industry News

Nearly ten years after it began and eight years after Google was sued over it, Google’s program that scans books in order to make them searchable has been found legal. A judge found fair use, especially in that “Google Books does not supersede or supplant books because it is not a tool to be used to read books.”

The ruling by Judge Denny Chin found that the Authors Guild’s claims that Google was massively infringing the copyright of books didn’t hold up. Below, some of the key highlights...

As someone who manages a content site with comments, there are things that bother me with some comments I get here. I dislike it when I see comments from people but they use their company name and/or keyword rich anchor text...

Last month I posted a theory on how Facebook might get taken down by competitors. From Taking down Facebook, piece by piece:

Facebook is in a classic position where, as a dominant provider of horizontal social services, it is in danger of being taken down piece by piece by several vertical players who provide specific, narrow experiences very well. Facebook has become a social media firehose. It won’t be replaced by another firehose, but by a bunch of different cocktails that users can...

John Mueller announced on Google+ that Google will be offering short site reviews for webmasters this coming Monday, November 18th at 10am EDT...

With Google’s Penguin update, it appears that the search engine has been paying significantly more attention to link spam as attempts to manipulate links and anchor text to a page. The Penguin Update was launched at Google on April 24th, 2012, and...

Whenever I see an article that cites academic research in an oversimplified, generic way, one of my hobbies is to dig into the source papers to see if those glib statements are accurate1. For example, here’s a journey through an article that states that we supposedly get approximately the same type of pleasure from talking about ourselves on social media as we do from having sex.

Having said that, naturally this paragraph from The Guardian’s The secrets of the world’s happiest cities...

We’ve seen a lot of articles about the negative effects of social networks this year. And yes, I’ve even written a few of those. So it was refreshing to read Roxane Gay’s What Twitter does — a reflection on the positive side of social networks:

Social networking does not offer a universal panacea, but it is something far more significant than “constant self-promotion.” The bonds of this community, at least the one I have found, are sprawled and unruly, but these bonds are not merely...

Guest Post by Dave Gowans of Conversion Factory.

Conversion Rate Optimization is all about understanding your target audience and what makes them tick. CRO tools are essential to gaining that insight, but you don’t necessarily have to invest in a new tool every time you want to dig a little deeper. In fact, often all you have to do is take advantage of the more advanced features of your current tools.

Here are 5 tricks for how to deeper visitor insight without investing in new tools. 1....