Industry News

Luke Wroblewski explains why those overlay introductory “tour” screens you often see in apps is such a bad idea in Designing for real world mobile use:

These issues stem from the fact that introductory tours show up before you ever get a chance to use an application. Most people are eager to jump right in and as a result, they skip reading the manual. The ones that do read haven’t seen the interface yet so they don’t have any sense of where and how the tips they’re learning will apply....

Pauline Jakober looks at three ways SEO and PPC work together to create a mutually beneficial relationship for a website.

As I mentioned in our monthly Google webmaster report this morning, it seems like there is an uptick in chatter around a possible Google update kicking off this morning. It is extremely early but I've received emails, tweets and other correspondence of a possible Google update...

Rick Robinson wrote a really interesting article on the huge differences in life expectancy between the wealthiest and poorest areas of a city, and how the move to Smart Cities is trying to combat that. From Death, life, and place in great digital cities:

At the heart of the Smarter Cities movement is the belief that the use of engineering and IT technologies, including social media and information marketplaces, can create more efficient and resilient city systems. Might that idea offer...

Yesterday, Search Engine Watch published a story that was a bit outdated. What they eventually did was redirect the story to an older story which said the same thing.

In short...

Within a week, two articles came out about resisting the urge to add new features quickly after a product is launched. First, Julie Zhuo makes the case for slow, small launches with clear “sunset” criteria in The tax of new, because of the inherent cost of maintaining and improving new features:

The tax that comes with introducing any new feature into your product is high. I cannot stress this enough. Sure, maybe the new feature isn’t hard to build, maybe it only takes a couple days and...

A few weeks ago, we reported that Google busted another link seller network. We didn't know which link seller network it was - until now. Matt Cutts, Google's head of search spam, tweeted last week that the link network they went after was "TLA linkselling sites...

Last week I wrote about How Do You Uncover Your Spammy Links? There I said, when you want to disavow links or have them removed, using Google Webmaster Tools link report is probably not enough. You probably need to use third party tools as well.