Industry News

As I reported in my live blogging last night and on Search Engine Land - Google's Matt Cutts announced a Panda refresh is coming this weekend. Either this Friday, March 15th or this Monday March 18th.
It has been 7 weeks since the last Panda refresh, version 24. So when this actually pushes out, it will be closer to 8 weeks since that last update.

As I reported last night during my live blogging - but things get lost there - Google is going to punish yet another link network in the next week or two.
Which network? I do not know yet, but I am sure that information will surface via the SEO forums when it does happen.

In 2006, Google battled Yahoo! and Microsoft for an algorithm developed by an Israeli Ph.D.student in Australia. The algorithm had a semantic element to it, and advanced Google in an algorithm arms race between the search giants (one of which doesn’t even have a search engine of its own now). We’ve seen the technology described [...]

The post How Google is Generating Query Refinements the Orion Way appeared first on SEO by the Sea.

At the popular SXSW conference Friday, Google's head of search spam, Matt Cutts announced that Google will be soon going after bad merchants with a new algorithm targeted at lowering their rankings in Google.
Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land first covered this, quoting Matt's statement during his presentation.
Matt said...

The ongoing WebmasterWorld thread has a huge spike in chatter over the past 48 hours with speculation around an update.
In the past 48 hours or so there have been over 100 new posts in the thread, all around webmasters and SEO asking if there was some sort of update.
There was a Google attack...

Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed is a punch-in-the-gut piece by David Cain. Consider this paragraph:

We’ve been led into a culture that has been engineered to leave us tired, hungry for indulgence, willing to pay a lot for convenience and entertainment, and most importantly, vaguely dissatisfied with our lives so that we continue wanting things we don’t have. We buy so much because it always seems like something is still missing.

Feeling indignant that he would insinuate...

Google has largely ignored Bing’s Scroogled campaign, the one attacking it over the pay-for-play change to Google Shoppping & Gmail privacy. But today, Google search chief Amit Singhal pushed back a bit, saying Bing perhaps should focus on making better products rather than attacking Google.

Speaking at the SXSW conference, when taking a question posed via Twitter about how Google views Bing’s attacks, Singhal responded to say “We focus on our users.” Then he continued: “Others should focus...

The growth of mobile search is like seeing a second child grow up. SEO isn’t bull. The knowledge graph, speech recognition & natural language are searches biggest challenges. And he really, really likes Star Trek. That’s just some of what the head of Google’s search efforts, Amit Singhal, shared when talking at SXSW today.

Singhal is senior vice president and a Google Fellow who oversees Google Search. He spoke during the “The Future of Google Search in a Mobile World” keynote at the SXSW...

Josh Emerson offers some words of advice that we should all take to heart:

But perhaps the most important thing I want to highlight here, is that the answer to most questions is it depends, and very often in the grey area between black and white. Try not to take extreme views on things, and perhaps see that there is always another level of complexity to be discovered in any decision you make.

We just came out of a season of arguing whether or not Flat Design is the answer to...

In The Guardian Tom Meltzer asks, Are our household appliances getting too complicated? Despite violating Betteridge’s law of headlines he makes some good points:

“The innovation is obviously being driven by manufacturers’ desire to add value and to differentiate themselves,” says analyst Neil Mason, head of retail research at market research company Mintel. “But from a consumer’s point of view, what they want is convenience and simplicity. When you run into trouble is when you add all...