Industry News

Clive Thompson takes on the “social media is bad for teens” narrative in Don’t Blame Social Media if Your Teen Is Unsocial. He discusses some findings by Microsoft researcher Danah Boyd:

What she has found, over and over, is that teenagers would love to socialize face-to-face with their friends. But adult society won’t let them. “Teens aren’t addicted to social media. They’re addicted to each other,” Boyd says. “They’re not allowed to hang out the way you and I did, so they’ve moved it...

In Snow Fail: Do Readers Really Prefer Parallax Web Design? Eric Jaffe reports on a recent study done at Purdue University by graduate student Dede Frederick:

“I’ve read from many blogs how people say it’s going to attract users and create so much of a better user experience,” Frederick tells Co.Design. “I thought it was going to be superior to a typical website in every aspect.”

As it happens, the parallax site was only superior in one sense — fun. None of the other survey...

We know manual actions expire but what about algorithmic actions, do they expire?
When you pick up a new domain name, you now need to look to see if it had a bad history. We know expired domains can either benefit you, do nothing for you, or seriously hurt your efforts on your new site.
Google's Matt Cutts chimed in about the difference between a manual action...

John Marbach outed Rap Genius for masking a link building scheme as an affiliate program. Right before Christmas, Matt Cutts posted first on Hacker News and then on Twitter that Google is looking into it. A day later...

Google representatives have been in the webmaster forums helping webmasters with their SEO and webmaster related questions all Christmas eve and day.

There are dozens of threads that Google's John Mueller has responded to both on Christmas eve and day...

It’s Christmas Eve, time for all good boys and girls to be expecting Santa Claus to be bringing them gifts. But where is jolly old St. Nick on his journey? Once again, there are two major services tracking him: NORAD and Google. Below, our annual review of the tracking sites and methods of using them that range from the web, to your mobile device, to your TV and even a good old-fashioned phone call. The Santa Trackers

Here are both major Santa Trackers providing updates in 2013: NORAD...

I’m a big fan of the recent move away from user stories to job stories to design better products. Alan Klement provides a good overview in Designing Features Using Job Stories. That said, I’m worried that personas are on the verge of extinction as collateral damage of this evolution. We can’t let that happen. Alan explains his issue with personas as follows:

The biggest and most pertinent problem with Personas is this: Personas are imaginary customers defined by attributes that don’t...

I keep coming back to this episode 227 from TWiG and in the video, Matt Cutts talked about the Hummingbird algorithm at exactly one hour and twenty minutes into the video. He spent maybe a minute or so talking about it.
Matt Cutts said that the Hummingbird algorithm actually effects 90% of all searches but he said only...

Remember, the warning from Google's Matt Cutts on linking too many sites together using footer links and keyword rich anchor text...