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All signs are pointing to a Google update being pushed out yesterday afternoon into today. The speculation across the SEO forums is that this is the Panda refresh we were expecting to see this weekend.
Google's Matt Cutts said we should expect to see a refresh of Panda sometime this Friday or Monday. It seems like the Panda update started actually yesterday afternoon and is continuing to propagate throughout now.

The BBC News, the world's largest broadcast news organization, has just received a unnatural links notification from Google. I kid you not.
A Google Webmaster Help thread has representative of the BBC web site asking Google for help in identifying the unnatural links, so they can make sure BBC.co.uk is clear of any Google penalty.
Nick from the BBC wrote...

About a year ago I wrote an article for Smashing Magazine called A Dad’s Plea To Developers Of iPad Apps For Children. It was generally well received, but some of the comments still haunt me. Like this one:

If you don’t care about your kids reading, then go on and keep buying apps for the ipad.

And this one:

Wow really?? great parents here.. having a kid under 7 stare at a screen, really?? come on!! no kid under 7 should use an iPad for what?? play outside, play with your...

I was going to write about the Google Reader shutdown but Brent Simmons beat me to the argument I was going to make. In Why I love RSS and You Do Too he sums up why we should all care about Google Reader’s demise:

Even if you don’t use an RSS reader, you still use RSS. If you subscribe to any podcasts, you use RSS. Flipboard and Twitter are RSS readers, even if it’s not obvious and they do other things besides. Lots of apps on the various app stores use RSS in at least some way. […] And...

On September 8, 2011, Google filed a patent named “System and Method for Confirming Authorship of Documents,” (U.S. Provisional Application Ser. No. 61/532,511). This provisional patent expired on September 9, 2012 without being prosecuted. A day later, on September 10th, Google filed two new versions of the patent, using the same name for both of [...]

The post Google Authorship Markup Patent Applications Published appeared first on SEO by the Sea.

Last night at SMX West, Google's Matt Cutts announced that the Panda algorithm will be more of a rolling update, as opposed to what it has been as a manually pushed out update.
I am not sure what I am going to do with my time now. I am no longer going to be able to get confirmations from Google about Panda updates. The updates are going to be less transparent

There are very few people as dependent on Google Reader as myself. Google knows that. No, really, they do, they know I am like the top top user of Google Reader. I switched to it in 2007 from Bloglines and never looked back. Now what am I going to do?
Google announced last night that they are closing Google Reader July 1, 2013.

Yesterday, Google’s CEO Larry Page announced that Andy Rubin would no longer be in charge of the mobile platform Android at Google,, but would be moving on to new challenges at the company. In the announcement, Page urged the entrepreneur and inventor to take “more moonshots please.” Andy Rubin brought Android to Google in 2004, [...]

The post These Are Not The Droids Google is Looking For? appeared first on SEO by the Sea.

Frank Chimero has a great follow-up to Tino Arnall’s excellent post No to NoUI. In *The Cloud is Heavy and Design Isn’t Invisible Frank explores what’s appropriate (and what’s not) about using “The Cloud” as a metaphor, and then he makes a great point about the Invisible Design trend:

Sometimes I wonder if the desire to obfuscate production and make the resulting design invisible or seamless to users diminishes their appreciation for the craft of building systems. I think there’s a...

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