Industry News

In Product Kyle Neath asks:

We are focused on likes, app opens, hours spent, pageviews, and company valuations — but do these translate to a better future? Are we using ads to provide for a connected humanity, or conning people into conspicuous consumption? It’s hard to judge. I do know that it just feels right when you build a good product. [...]

That’s really the core of it: how can we create financially sustainable products that bring people joy and make the world a better...

Thousands of hotels listed within Google+ Local appear to have had links leading to their official sites “hijacked” and replaced with ones leading to third-party booking services. Google+ Local listings are what Google depends on to provide results in Google Maps or Google Search, when people look for local businesses. A Hijacked URL

For example, here is the “verified” page for the Courtyard Marriott in Sherman Oaks, California:



The arrows show how the URLs for the hotel’s official...

News came out in a Google Press release yesterday, Google to Acquire Nest, that Google had purchased Nest, a company focused on connecting things found in your home to the internet, including the Nest Learning Thermostat, and recently released...

On January 9th we reported on early chatter of a Google update, which has now grown to almost 200 comments. Early on, the chatter was slow but now, over the past couple days...

First spotted via Hacker News, Bing now has enabled searchers to go to https://www.bing.com and search over Bing SSL search.

I covered this at Search Engine Land where I said early tests show that when on SSL search...

Poorna Bell’s So Long, FOMO is making the rounds today:

At nearly every restaurant table I saw, there was at least one person (if not most) who spent most of their time taking photos or video to put on Facebook later, or searching for something on the internet, or playing games or just checking for texts. For more and more of us, technology is taking over, invading even our most personal and private of moments.

This idea that technology is turning us into antisocial monkeys is getting...

The Google Disavow tool is a popular subject with all the link penalties floating around. But the big question is, does it actually help your site to rank better...

Vijay Sundaram takes the concept of technical debt and applies it to User Experience Design:

You know you’re a subprime borrower when your team decides to “clean this up next release”. But the next release has a backlog of critical bug fixes, must-have feature requests, and of course plenty of new design shortcuts that emerge in the process. What’s more, the usage data for the last release is showing great engagement and no one has complained yet about the shortcuts you took. Fixing those...

I recently downloaded ExactTarget’s 2014 State of Marketing, and found the data extremely compelling. Here’s what they had to say about methodology and respondents: The 2014 State of Marketing survey was conducted online from October 24, 2013, until November 1, 2013. The survey was sent to more than 48,000 marketing professionals and a total of 2,651 marketers started the survey, with 1,959 surveys completed (74% completion rate).

Interestingly, Moz’s own industry survey was sent around the...