Industry News

A Google Webmaster Help thread has Google's John Mueller responding to webmaster concern over off topic links.

Off topic links are when sites that are unrelated to you are linking to your site...

Cap Watkins in Just Ship*:

We work in a world now where fast isn’t good enough. Where quantity is fairly regularly getting edged out by quality. You shipped twelve just-good-enough things this year? You’re about to get smoked by folks who shipped three of those things thoughtfully and holistically. Where you cut corners on twelve projects to get them out the door, someone else crafted three focused experiences and left themselves little-to-no design or technical debt.

This also...

Will Google be transforming the way that we order from restaurants and other merchants such as pharmacists? A patent application published by Google this past week points to the possibility.

Google has been experimenting with showing menus from...

Perhaps it’s SEOs’ “Oreo” moment, a tweet relating to search engine optimization that’s gained nearly as much attention as Oreo’s famous Super Bowl blackout tweet. But the subject was a perfect storm of goodness — a real-life example of Google doing the type of thing in search it seems to be telling others not to do.

Yesterday, the head of Google’s web spam team Matt Cutts announced a new Google Scraper Report for publishers to use if they see a site that has copied or “scraped” its content...

Matt Cutts, Google's head spam guy, posted on Twitter that he wants you to submit reports and examples of scraper sites or URLs that are outranking the original source.

He made a Google Doc form where you can submit the report over here. The form asks you the source URL...

One of the most frustrating experiences for any publisher is discovering that someone not only has copied your content but outranks you on Google for searches related to that content. Now, Google seems to have heard the complaints and has launched a tool to help.

Called the Google Scraper Report, it was announced by the head of Google’s web spam team Matt Cutts on Twitter: If you see a scraper URL outranking the original source of content in Google, please tell us about it:...

Evie Nagy did a fascinating interview with danah boyd about her new book, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. On how teens use Facebook and Twitter:

They’re also more likely to have protected accounts, and use it to talk to a small group of their actual friends. To them Facebook is everyone they ever knew, and Twitter is something they’ve locked down to just a handful of people they care about — which is often the opposite of how adults use them.

A lot of the...

I spotted a thread at Black Hat World asking why have we not seen a case where a former Google employee who worked in search quality sell their knowledge or publish the secret sauce on what it would take to rank well quickly and get rich fast...

The small screens are coming, and we’re going to have to adjust our design processes accordingly. Emily Schwartzman does a great job of exploring how they worked through some of this complexity in Cooper, Augmedix and Google Glass: No Real Estate? No Problem:

Designing for Google Glass made us rethink the way we do software design. Many of our projects devote a significant amount of time to defining the framework of an application and developing the detailed design of key screens. When...