Industry News

Jay Cassano did an excellent interview with Nate Bolt, who is in charge of design research at Facebook. My favorite part from Secrets From Facebook’s Mobile UX Testing Team:

We try to never deliver any reports ever, if possible. Reports can’t attend meetings and they can’t argue in favor of their findings. They die in the wastebasket immediately. So we’ll bring up some data in a session, we brainstorm on a whiteboard, absorb some of the human patterns of the people that are using this...

There is a lot of new chatter in the WebmasterWorld forums, along with random threads at other forums including Google Webmaster Help about Google's search results shifting around and some webmasters claiming huge declines in referrals from Google starting around 8pm EDT last night.
Some are hoping it was just an Analytics issue...

Folks at Google get cold-call emails out of the blue just like everybody else. Here’s an email that a colleague of mine got recently:

I was on your website www.google.com and wanted to shoot you a quick note. I think I can make a few changes (aesthetically and/or SEO – wise) to make your site convert more visitors into leads and to get it placed higher in the organic search results, for a few of the select terms.

This is NOT like one of those foreign emails you probably get in your inbox...

Google AdSense is ten years old today and Google wants everyone to know about it - as they should. AdSense has given Google a way to bring in a nice and sizable secondary source of income...

I’m always interested to see how the field of web marketing is changing over time and what skills, tactics, and practices are receiving particular attention. One of the ways I track this is to look  at results from several sites on a semi-annual basis, including: LinkedIn’s bio searches SimplyHired’s Job Trends Indeed’s Job Trends Google’s Keyword Trends Craigslist Keyword Search

This process is by no means scientific or precise (and unfortunately, I’ve not been detailed or diligent enough...

Last Wednesday Google released the spam algorithm to target very spammy niches and "illegal" link building and spamming techniques. Did it work...

As you probably remember, Google launched a new spam algorithm to target spammy queries such as payday loans. It had a serious impact on spammers from what I see, which I will cover right after this story...

Last Wednesday we reported complaints in the forums of webmasters noticing their links are dropping within Google Webmaster Tools. In short, the links shown in Google Webmaster Tools today versus two weeks ago was a fraction of the number.

Well...

I love this paragraph from Dave Rupert’s latest post on images in responsive design:

If the web cannot keep pace with a native experience in speed (rendering in under 1000ms), we’re all going to be out of a job. An uptick in native app usage means budget dollars would follow the trend and be poured into native apps. Meanwhile public facing websites will be left to rot because no one cared and we littered the web with bullshit. Native wins, the web dies, Zeldman hangs up his beanie, and...