Industry News

Lisa Maria Martin gives some advice on What To Do With Those Dreaded FAQs:

These all underscore FAQs’ fatal flaw: they are content without context, delivered without regard for the larger experience of the website. You can hear the absurdity in the name itself: if users are asking the same questions so frequently, then there is an obvious gulf between their needs and the site content. (And if not, then we have a labeling problem.) Instead of sending users to a jumble of...

Friday afternoon, I broke the news at Search Engine Land that Matt Cutts, Google's head of search spam, announced they just targeted yet another link network. This one is named Anglo Rank...

So much has been written about the disastrous launch of healthcare.gov. But Sheryl Solberg and Michael Shear’s Inside the Race to Rescue a Health Care Site, and Obama hit especially close to home. Much of it reads like any number of software development projects I’ve been involved in over the years:

In Herndon, as engineers tried to come to grips with repeated crashes, a host of problems were becoming apparent: inadequate capacity in its data center and sloppy computer code, partly the...

Within the announcement Google made earlier this year about the Hummingbird update is the search engine might rewrite queries, substituting some terms within them, when they think doing so might improve the results that searches see, and a very...

Early this morning, Google pushed out a Google Toolbar PageRank update. This update shocked webmasters because no one expected it, at least not in 2013. As you may remember, the last Toolbar...

Andy Beaumont wrote a great piece about his popular Tab Closed; Didn’t Read Tumblr site, which documents websites that obscure their content behind modal overlays. His point on analytics in The Value of Content is spot on:

Analytics only tell you part of the story — if that’s all you bother to find out, and you have absolute faith in those numbers, then you’re going to end up putting a modal overlay on your site. Analytics will tell you that you got more “conversions”. Analytics will show...

It sounds pretty damning. Two recent surveys suggest that Google Shopping isn’t leading searchers to the best prices on products. But the surveys weren’t well documented, nor did they include competitors like Bing, Shopzilla, PriceGrabber and Nextag, which have similar issues. So, Search Engine Land will be running its own fully documented tests. Every few days, we’ll search for an item and show what we found, starting with today’s test, a search for a toaster. How Much Is That Toaster In The...

It was a pretty busy month for Google over the last 30 days or so. We had a few ranking changes going on at Google. All of them were unconfirmed by Google.
We also had...