Industry News

Last night at around 3am EST (this morning), Google's Matt Cutts Tweeted, "Today we're taking action on a French link network that violates our quality guidelines (Buzzea)."
Buzzea has already posted a message on their site acknowledging the Google penalty and telling everyone they are closing up. The translated version reads:

Anthony Colangelo explains how he uses a technique called Switch Programming to help solve coding problems:

We gave each other 30 seconds to explain our intended results, and nothing else. Then, we traded computers and got to work.

I was working on a fairly new project with a codebase that Mark really hadn’t been in, and Mark was working on an old project that I hadn’t touched for over a year and a half (long story). Point is, neither of us were intimately familiar with the...

Last night, Google published a blog post on their webmaster central blog notifying affiliates that if their sites do not add any value, then they may be penalized...

I rarely find myself in a position where I want to “engage” with the company who makes my toothpaste, so I generally don’t follow brands on Twitter (or any non-individual accounts, for that matter). But I recently indulged in a couple of guilty pleasure accounts. Faces in Things posts pictures of (wait for it) things that look like faces, and Behind the Scenes posts (wait for it) behind-the-scenes pictures from iconic movies.

I found the accounts interesting and funny for a while, but then I...

Cyrus Shepard last week posted on Google+ that the big UK law firm was likely penalized by Google based on looking at:

(1) A recent large drop in traffic and search visibility as reported by Search Metrics and

(2) Irwin Mitchell's web site no longer ranking in Google for it's own...

I’d like to give a personal shout-out to every single person who visited ContentVerve.com in 2013. Thank you for your time and interest – it means a lot to me!

If you’re here for the first time, this rundown of the 5 most popular posts of 2013 is an excellent introduction to what ContentVerve.com is all about.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot – I also have a quick question to ask you at the bottom of the post. 1. 10 Call-to-Action Case Studies w/ Examples from Real Button Tests When it comes...

I really enjoyed Ben Crair’s essay on those indicators that show you when someone else is typing during an IM chat — which he calls The Most Awkward Feature of Online Chat. I thought I was the only one who started getting anxious when I see that indicator sit there for more than a few seconds. A quote from Clive Thompson sums it up:

Hmmm, why did they start typing and then stop? Obviously, most of the time this isn’t an issue, but if you’re involved in a sensitive or emotionally charged...

Jared Spool in Design is the Rendering of Intent:

Over the last year, we’ve started explaining design as “the rendering of intent.” The designer imagines an outcome and puts forth activities to make that outcome real.

He believes this is one of the reasons why, even though they’re both government sites, We the People is so much better than the enrollment system for Global Entry:

There’s no technical reason why the We The People team had to end up with the design they did. It...

Leaving nothing to chance, Apple’s ensured that anyone searching for “Mac” on Google or Bing today, the 30th birthday of the Mac, will know about the anniversary. The company has purchased ads that lead to a special Mac birthday area of the Apple site.

Above is an example of what shows on Google, for a search on “Mac,” an ad saying “Happy Birthday, Mac” and inviting people to “Explore 30 years of innovation on the Mac.” The ad links over to the page at Apple about Macs, which has a pitch for...