Industry News

Ten years ago today was my first post on the Search Engine Roundtable and I have not stopped since. I've been writing about search, SEO, Google, Bing, Yahoo and search engines that have come and gone for ten straight years. On average, I push out five articles a day on this site - it still amazes me to this day that there are five new things I can talk about within the search niche daily.
I've spent 30% of my life writing about search engines...

Adam Corner provides a very interesting perspective on modern advertising in Ad nauseam — Advertising turned anti-consumerism into a weapon. He starts off by discussing a new brand of ad that wants to join us in our distaste for, well, advertising:

These ads want to be our friends — to empathise with us against the tyranny of the corporate world they inhabit. Just when we thought we’d cottoned on to subliminal advertising, personalised sidebars on web pages, advertorials and infomercials,...

Tim Caynes’ on exposure is an honest and accurate depiction of what it’s like to work at a design agency:

if there’s one thing that really hits home in your first 3 months of transition, it’s the change in pace. and it’s not that the change in pace is a bad thing. it’s just that it feels like you don’t have enough time to think. which means you don’t have enough time to design. which is stressful and surprising and difficult and awkward. because you might not actually be able to do it....

A WebmasterWorld thread plus dozens of threads at the Google Webmaster Help forums have webmasters complaining about both ranking changes and traffic drops from Google's search engine.

The traffic drop would make sense being that it is a holiday and on US holidays traffic normally drops...

In The Disconnectionists Nathan Jurgenson takes to task those who speak about digital detoxes and the negative social effects of being online:

Op-eds, magazine articles, news programs, and everyday discussion frames logging off as reclaiming real social interaction with your real self and other real people. The R in IRL. When the digital is misunderstood as exclusively “virtual,” then pushing back against the ubiquity of connection feels like a courageous re-embarking into the wilderness...

It’s official. NORAD Tracks Santa, the annual Santa tracking effort run by the joint US-Canadian air defense organization, will be using Microsoft’s Bing for the second year to map Santa’s route. But will Google be mapping Santa on a different route, as happened when it ran its own breakaway tracking service last year? There’s hope of perhaps a “Miracle On 34th Street” moment that may prevent this. No One Tells Santa Where To Fly

Let’s be clear about one thing. Santa Claus flies wherever...

Happy Thanksgiving (and Hanukkah - rare overlap) to all our readers. Today I wanted to share with you the logos, doodles, themes, designs and animations from the search industry...

I read two really great articles this week about a couple of recent language shifts. The first is Megan Garber’s English Has a New Preposition, Because Internet, all about the “because-noun”:

However it originated, though, the usage of “because-noun” (and of “because-adjective” and “because-gerund”) is one of those distinctly of-the-Internet, by-the-Internet movements of language. It conveys focus (linguist Gretchen McCulloch: “It means something like ‘I’m so busy being totally absorbed...

A senior Google AdWords advertiser and consultant, Whitey, posted in the WebmasterWorld forums that he has seen new cases of Google AdWords employees stealing or trying to poach clients away from AdWords agencies...