Industry News

Are Google’s search results getting too ad-heavy? A new blog post suggesting that Google’s non-paid listings make up only a tiny fraction of the entire page has sparked some discussion, though the exact percentage actually varies on how you count what’s on the page and from query-to-query.

According to a recent blog post by Aaron Harris, co-founder and CEO of Tutorspree, organic search results — listings that are not paid ads and ranked because Google thinks they are the best answer to a...

Facebook announced yesterday they have expanded Graph Search to all U.S. users and it will be rolling out to more and more of these users over the next few days.

Graph Search launched on January 15th of this year and made a big splash...

We mourned the closing of AltaVista when it was announced at the end of last month. But today’s the day it actually closed. No more AltaVista. Gone. Perhaps no one will suffer as much as the inhabitants of Pawnee, Indiana.

The fictional town from the TV show Parks & Recreation has mentioned AltaVista in various episodes over the years, perhaps giving the now-defunct search engine the most recognition in the Media Blitz episode from Season 3.

Ben Wyatt’s failure as a teenage mayor is...

I recently had to convince a client to pause their redesign efforts and work on their content first. This is how I did it. I tried to stay away from UX jargon and overly technical arguments. There is obviously much more to say about Content Strategy and related disciplines, but this was an exercise in trying to make a succinct argument by only focusing on information that’s most relevant to the client. I’m posting it here in the event that it might be useful to those who have to make similar...

At SMX Advanced, I moderated a panel about technical SEO. Google’s Maile Ohye spoke about SEO best practices for technical implementation of mobile sites based on how Google crawls, indexed, and ranks mobile content and presents it to searchers on mobile devices.

She also talked about Google’s recent announcement that the mobile user experience is a factor in how Google ranks results for smartphone searchers.

Below more details on that, as well as resources on how best to architect your...

By now most people have read Paul Miller’s I’m still here: back online after a year without the internet. The article is certainly deserving of all the attention it received back in May. I’m not sure what I expected — perhaps a gloating, holier-than-thou account of the virtues of going on an internet sabbatical to “find yourself”. But that’s not what this is. It’s a raw, often sad, always authentic account of a year that didn’t go at all as expected.

There is much to discuss and analyze in...

Graeme Wood takes a fascinating look at The World of Black-Ops Reputation Management for New York Magazine:

Whoever he was, it seemed that “Xander Fields” had built a whole Potemkin universe of positive-press websites that amplified made-up praise, often by made-up people, for a handful of rich folks with messy online reputations. I was now deep down in a ­rabbit hole but hadn’t yet landed with a ­satisfying thud. Who was “Xander Fields”?

I love reading stories like this. Consider...

It was an incredibly busy month in the Google SEO/Webmaster world. Besides for Google announcing the spam algorithm, explaining about Panda's slower rollouts, releasing a new mobile ranking factor and pushing out a multi-week update...

Mark McGurl wrote a fascinating essay on the recent Zombie Renaissance in literature:

We are living in a time when what counts as “life” is in significant scientific dispute, and in the heyday of zombie computers and zombie banks, zombie this and zombie that. Why wouldn’t we also be living in a time of zombie literary forms? Whatever their specific emphases and intricacies, all these zombies represent a plague of suspended agency, a sense that the human world is no longer (if it ever...