Industry News

In March, Google’s chief web spam fighter Matt Cutts promised that the Penguin Update designed to fight spam would get a big refresh later this year. Today, Cutts gave an update — keep waiting. It’s still a few weeks off. Along the way, there’s some confusion about whether the next Penguin Update will be Penguin 2 or Penguin 4. It’ll be Penguin 4, in how we reckon things. Let’s dive in. This Week Wasn’t Penguin

Publishers have already been wondering if a change in rankings that many have...

The new Timelapse site, created by Time Inc. and Google, is a pretty amazing way to see how any part of the world has changed since 1984 through 2012. The site offers amazing animations such as the growth of Las Vegas and the shrinking of the Columbia Glacier, and you can point it at any part of the world you want.

Google explains more about how it has collected the images with the US Geological Survey since 2009 and sifted through to find those with good quality, and without cloud cover,...

About a year ago Cennydd Bowles wrote a very good article called A changing tide, in which he thought out loud about the trend of high-profile agency designers joining internal product teams. One of his hypotheses was this:

A great agency is still a strong asset to the industry and its clients, just as a bad agency is still harmful – and there are undoubtedly counter-examples to my evidence. However, one thing is clear: the design industry’s focus is no longer on agencies. It is on...

An ongoing WebmasterWorld has a huge uptick in chatter around major ranking and search result fluctuation over the night. It seems from this and from all the complaints in the Google Webmaster Help forums that there is indeed some sort of update going on...

A transformation was triggered at Google with their announcement of the Knowledge Graph in the Official Google Blog post, Introducing the Knowledge Graph: things, not strings. That transformation was one less concerned with matching keywords, and more concerned with matching concepts, understanding entities, and bringing knowledge about entities to searchers in knowledge panels next to [...]

The post How Google Decides What to Know in Knowledge Graph Results appeared first on SEO by the Sea.

Here are the tools I use regularly to help with my SEO consulting services.

UX deliverables had a rocky year so far. I feel particularly bad for the humble wireframe, which took some serious knocks over the past few months. There’s also a growing skepticism about the value of Personas. The Persona thing made me particularly uneasy because I’ve always been a huge fan, and we still start most of our projects with a workshop to define Personas and User Journeys.

That unease led me to introspection, which is a good thing, because it made me step back and revisit why we...

Despite effectively renewing its search deal with Microsoft recently, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Yahoo wants a way to break that deal. Why didn’t Yahoo take the opportunity it just had? I suspect that technically and financially, it couldn’t. Yahoo’s “Get Out Of Microsoft Free” Card

The WSJ story says that Yahoo has been “quietly” trying to find a way out of its deal with Microsoft. There are some very specific reasons why Yahoo could break that ten year deal early. One of...