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It’s not the load that breaks you down, it’s the way you carry it.

— Lou Holtz (retired American football coach, author, and motivational speaker)

I can’t stop thinking about this quote ever since I saw it on Quote Vadis. At some point over the last three or four years, life became pretty heavy. The pressures of two kids, a career, and a life that’s just public enough to invite some nastiness every once in a while can really wear you down.

So it’s easy to fix your eyes on the...

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Some of you may remember that I have started training parkour some time ago. It made me not only 200% healthier over the recent years (I feel 10 years younger by now) it also inspired me in other areas of life.

I've already coined a new term for a positive SEO technique that I call "Google Parkour" which basically means helping your "competitors" by linking out to them and ultimately getting traffic from them. It doesn't work completely as imagined but it works to some extent. It works...

On Friday, I reported three times at Search Engine Land on a widespread penalty Google dished out over advertorials.

In short, Google penalized Interflora, a very popular UK flower seller...

A day after warning publishers against advertorials, will Google’s search team now have to penalize parts of its own company for running advertorials? Perhaps, and if so, it wouldn’t be the first time. It’s also another absurd chapter in Google’s war on paid links. Google Says: Advertorials, Beware!

After news came out yesterday that Google had apparently penalized Interflora for running advertorials — and also reduced the PageRank values of many UK newspapers that carried these — Google...

Des Traynor did a great interview with Ryan Singer, Product Manager at 37signals. I’m a huge fan of Ryan’s, and I agree with most of what he says in the interview. But there’s one part I’d like to challenge a bit.

Answering the question “Did you ever consider techniques like personas or user journeys, or any of those UX design methods?” Ryan says, “That stuff is all terrible”. He then obliterates the use of personas before going into a bit more detail a couple of questions later:

The...

Here’s some great advice from Joshua Porter: when you’re in a design meeting (or any other meeting, for that matter), Always be capturing:

“Always be capturing” is about the habit of continuously recording the value from your conversation. For example: If you’re talking about a new concept, you should be sketching it as you talk so your team has a shared understanding and an artifact of the conversation.

Joshua gives some great tips, including taking photos of your sketches and...

Neither The Nation or Computerworld should write about patents. Period. Never. In the past couple of days Computerworld posted a “breaking news” story about the publication of a Google patent application from 9 months ago (not breaking news). The Nation wrote a followup story on Computerworld‘s story, and made the same mistake.

Both saw [...]

The post The Traditional News Agency is Dead (On Google News) appeared first on SEO by the Sea.

It has almost been five months since the last Penguin refresh and no updates to the Penguin algorithm are in sight.
In fact, I reported yesterday at Search Engine Land that No, Google Hasnât Released Unannounced Penguin Updates. Why did I have to report that? Couple reasons...