Industry News

As discussed in my last article about technical SEO issues, it's crucial to be sure that you have no server errors on your site. But there are other technical issues that relate to your website navigation and how you set up your overall site architecture.

If any of you read some of the comments left on the stuff I write here, you will see some of the anger and actual hate some webmasters have towards Google and even myself. They think that I am paid by Google to feed you things that they want you to hear and believe all in an effort to set you up and make you all fail.

It’s pretty easy to sit back and slam Google for how you think it should make decisions when it comes to search listings. It’s much harder to actually make those decisions, when you have a deeper understanding of all the implications involved. To experience this better, here’s a chance to put yourself in Google’s shoes and make some of the tough decisions.

Below is a video from a special session we did at our SMX West search marketing conference earlier this year. Patrick Thomas, Google’s...

Keith Houston’s fascinating essay The Ancient Roots of Punctuation begins like this:

The story of the hashtag begins sometime around the fourteenth century, with the introduction of the Latin abbreviation “lb,” for the Roman term libra pondo, or “pound weight.” Like many standard abbreviations of that period, “lb” was written with the addition of a horizontal bar, known as a tittle, or tilde. And though printers commonly cast this barred abbreviation as a single character, it was the...

I continue to be fascinated by the smart city movement. The multiplexed metropolis is a very interesting look by The Economist at the pros and cons of connecting cities through open access to all kinds of information:

But clever cities will not necessarily be better ones. Rather than becoming paragons of democracy, they could turn into electronic panopticons in which everybody is constantly watched. They could be paralysed by hackers, or by bugs in labyrinthine software. They could...

So called embedded posts have just been introduced on Google+. Personally I am quite wary of any new Google services or features. I fell on my face too often.

What's good for Google is not automatically good for you.

Yes, I still ban Google search here on this blog but I use Google+ frequently. I also still use Google Analytics and Google Webfonts among others. So I am willing to give Google a chance each time. Do embedded posts from Google+ make sense? Let's just try to make them work:...

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...