Industry News

We know manual actions expire but what about algorithmic actions, do they expire?
When you pick up a new domain name, you now need to look to see if it had a bad history. We know expired domains can either benefit you, do nothing for you, or seriously hurt your efforts on your new site.
Google's Matt Cutts chimed in about the difference between a manual action...

John Marbach outed Rap Genius for masking a link building scheme as an affiliate program. Right before Christmas, Matt Cutts posted first on Hacker News and then on Twitter that Google is looking into it. A day later...

Google representatives have been in the webmaster forums helping webmasters with their SEO and webmaster related questions all Christmas eve and day.

There are dozens of threads that Google's John Mueller has responded to both on Christmas eve and day...

It’s Christmas Eve, time for all good boys and girls to be expecting Santa Claus to be bringing them gifts. But where is jolly old St. Nick on his journey? Once again, there are two major services tracking him: NORAD and Google. Below, our annual review of the tracking sites and methods of using them that range from the web, to your mobile device, to your TV and even a good old-fashioned phone call. The Santa Trackers

Here are both major Santa Trackers providing updates in 2013: NORAD...

I’m a big fan of the recent move away from user stories to job stories to design better products. Alan Klement provides a good overview in Designing Features Using Job Stories. That said, I’m worried that personas are on the verge of extinction as collateral damage of this evolution. We can’t let that happen. Alan explains his issue with personas as follows:

The biggest and most pertinent problem with Personas is this: Personas are imaginary customers defined by attributes that don’t...

I keep coming back to this episode 227 from TWiG and in the video, Matt Cutts talked about the Hummingbird algorithm at exactly one hour and twenty minutes into the video. He spent maybe a minute or so talking about it.
Matt Cutts said that the Hummingbird algorithm actually effects 90% of all searches but he said only...

Remember, the warning from Google's Matt Cutts on linking too many sites together using footer links and keyword rich anchor text...

I’m always looking for ways to make our workflows more efficient, often to the frustration of my colleagues. I admittedly make them test out way too many tools. But I think I finally found a winning integration that everyone can get behind. First, a bit of background.

We use HipChat as our group chat and IM tool. We have a general room where we all hang out (but I’ll be honest with you, it mostly contains gifs), and then we also set up dedicated project rooms where we discuss...

‘Tis the time for introspection, and this year we all seem to wonder about the future of online publishing — and in particular, what role the personal blog will play going forward. Jason Kottke kicks us off with The blog is dead, long live the blog:

Instead of blogging, people are posting to Tumblr, tweeting, pinning things to their board, posting to Reddit, Snapchatting, updating Facebook statuses, Instagramming, and publishing on Medium. In 1997, wired teens created online diaries, and...