Industry News

Trying to get your head around Google authorship? The Google Webmaster Central blog has posted a new FAQ designed to provide some answers. What Qualifies For Authorship?

What pages can have authorship applied to them? Criteria include the page actually being mostly authored by the designated author, that it carries a byline and that it’s a single article, not a compilation page of articles by the author. No Mascots Allowed!

Think it would be funny if the Geico gecko appeared as an...

On Twitter, there are many different “conversations” happening simultaneously. There are also particular moments — TV finales, sporting events, breaking news and more — where many people have all “tuned in” at once. Both types of conversations are opportunities for marketers, when approached the right way.

I’ll be talking more about tapping into these conversations and “now” moments with Richard Alfonsi, Twitter’s vice president of global online sales, during a keynote conversation at our...

Moz published a story yesterday showing a high correlation between Google +1s and Google's search rankings.
Shortly after, Google's head of search spam, Matt Cutts, went over to Hacker News and debunked it. He said, +1s do not have any impact on search rankings at Google.
He wrote:

Ainsley Wagoner shares a story from architecture school in How We Measure Success. She describes a lecture in which their architecture professor first painted a picture of what it’s like to chase the best internships straight out of school, and work oneself to death. And then the professor contrasted that option with this one:

Or you can stop right now and ask yourself what kind of life you want to have. Look around you and figure out where you can make a real impact as designers and...

Today marks the 10th birthday of the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization – SEMPO – formed to be a trade advocacy body for the search marketing industry. What’s a decade of the group produced? An annual industry survey. Beyond that, little that really seems to stand out, especially compared to other industry groups like the DMA.

My column today at Marketing Land looks at this more, so check that out: 10 Years Later, Do We Need SEMPO?

Back in early June I reported how Google told us that the only links you need are the links in Webmaster Tools for reconsideration request purposes...

Quentin Hardy has some interesting thoughts on what happens in a world of perfect recollection in his essay What’s Lost When Everything Is Recorded:

There is much to be gained from storage, of course. Who would not thrill to hear Lincoln at Gettysburg, or Shakespeare playing even a lesser role at the Globe? But Shakespeare’s plays were also reconstructions from the memories of diverse actors, some years after a performance. Our greatest literature was generated by an imperfect collective...

About two years ago Marc Andreessen proclaimed that software is eating the world (beware the WSJ paywall):

My own theory is that we are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy.

We’ve seen this shift toward software in the content arena too, where it’s impossible to ignore the constant stream of stories about the struggles of print media. And lately, it seems that Medium is...

Google down, as verified by Down For Everyone Or Just Me?

It wasn’t you. It was Google. Specifically, Google.com went down around 3:50pm PT for about five minutes, a very rare occurrence. Other Google services also appear to have had issues.

We’ll update if we hear more, but it appears back now. It certainly sparked brief panic on Twitter. Twitter search service Topsy tweeted a chart showing the sudden spike in tweets:

The last time something even close to this happened was probably...