Industry News

Google is really encouraging people to (1) sign up for Google+ and (2) mark their pages with rich snippets and authorship for the search results.

Google came out with a way to encourage publishers and webmasters to do both of these...

When you search, especially for topics that you know little about, chances are that you might not include the most relevant terms in your query, or you might use words that may have ambiguous meanings.

One of the areas where search engines focus...

Dave Cain posted on Google+ that his client received an unnatural link warning via Google Webmaster Tools and one of the two examples given was a link he has from DMOZ, the Open Directory Project...

On Friday, Danny Sullivan reported at Search Engine Land that Google is planning to give webmasters a year worth of top search query data within webmaster tools.

Currently, Google only provides 90 days worth of this data...

I love the phrase “getting caught in the melancholy of the infinite scroll.” That’s just one gem from Alexis Madrigal’s The Machine Zone: This Is Where You Go When You Just Can’t Stop Looking at Pictures on Facebook. He explores this strange dark side of “flow”, where we get stuck in an online activity and can’t stop doing it, even though there’s no tangible benefit:

What is the machine zone? It’s a rhythm. It’s a response to a fine-tuned feedback loop. It’s a powerful space-time...

Testimonials can be an effective tool for overcoming friction. However, there are several factors you need to consider if you want the full impact of your testimonials. Placement is one of them.

Here’s an interesting little case study where changing the placement of reader testimonials on an ebook landing page increased downloads by 64.53% Background info

I recently published a free ebook on conversion optimization called 7 Universal Conversion Optimization Principles. I decided to...

How do you convince a bunch of publishers to buy ads on your service? If you’re Google, how about withholding data from those publishers about how people are finding their sites, as a way to drive them into your ad system? I don’t think Google planned for this to happen. But that’s the end result, in what could be called the “Not Provided” scheme. “Dark Google” Nearly Two Years Old

In October 2011 — nearly two years ago now — “Dark Google” was born. Google began holding back information it...

Data telling publishers the top terms being used to find their web sites will be available for up to one year in Google Webmaster Tools, rather than the current 90 days, Google has said.

The news came in response to an article today on Search Engine Land covering a conflict between Google limiting the time period such data was available in Google Webmaster Tools but setting no such limit for publishers who imported that data into Google AdWords accounts.

From that article, Google’s...