Industry News

Google prepared — and briefly was showing — a special logo in honor of today’s near miss with Asteroid 2012 DA14. However, the company removed that out of respect, following the meteor explosion over Russia.

Below, you can see the logo — or “doodle” as Google calls them — that was intended to run today on Google. It shows an asteroid plunging down toward the second G in Google, which dodges out of the way:



The logo above should show the animation, but if it doesn’t, here’s one part of...

One of Google’s oldest features is Google Alerts, where you can enter keywords you want to monitor and get an email report each day about any new search results that match those terms. It was awesome, but for several weeks, it’s become nearly useless.

My long-standing settings have been for Google to check each day against “Everything” and bring back any new listings with my name in them. That has meant it routinely finds blog posts, web pages and news articles with references.

Here’s a...

Matt Cutts of Google posted an interested video on YouTube that shared the types of Google Webmaster Tools notifications they send out.

Google sends out hundreds of thousands of notifications each month and 90% of those are black hat related...

I really enjoyed Michele Catalano’s Grimes, Pop Music, and Cultural Elitism, which starts with this quote from Clare Boucher (better known as Grimes):

I don’t see why we have to hate something just because it’s successful, or assume that because it is successful it has no substance.

It’s an article about our tendency to look down on pop music (and the people who like pop music), but it applies to a much broader cultural phenomenon:

The elitism one shows when they dismiss pop...

It seems like someone at Google took a vacation because Webmaster Tools seems to have been recently having many many problems.

The latest issue being reported is that the search queries report is delayed...

In Yours vs. Mine Dustin Curtis explains his preference to use “Your stuff” as opposed to “My stuff” in interfaces. It might sound trivial, but whether we use “My” or “Your” reveals something about how we view technology:

After thinking about this stuff for a very long time, I’ve settled pretty firmly in the camp of thinking that interfaces should mimic social creatures, that they should have personalities, and that I should be communicating with the interface rather than the interface...

I am seeing a nice number of reports that signal the onset of a Google update being rolled out.

There are reports in the ongoing WebmasterWorld thread and tons and tons of threads in Google Webmaster Tools from webmasters claiming their sites no longer rank in Google...

A week ago we reported a massive drop in links reported within Google Webmaster Tools.
After about a week or more of the bug being reported, Webmasters are just now reporting that their link count is returning back to normal.