When a link is more than a link, web application exploits and more – The Monday May 17th Roundup

Vancouver is rich and warm again, about time. And with the weather comes a rich week for quality posts on SEO, technology, and UX. We’ve got some doozies, including newly granted Google patents, working around web application exploits, and more.

• We start the week with Mediadonis on why a link isn’t just a link any more. In this post he discusses how a 2004 patent by Google that just got granted is going to change the way that Google deals with links.
• Next up Mailchimp with  a wonderful example of email marketing reminiscent of my “lessons from the little guys” posts. Bonobos shorts, discontented with their weekly gorgeous email campaign, decided to implement an “exclusive” email list.

• CSS tricks has a great, well, CSS trick. It ends up that with a “pointer-events:none;” rule , you can disable a link on a page. Why would you want to do this? I can think of all sorts of reasons, but theirs is as good as any: you can build a navigation system across a site, then, with a single rule per page, turn off any links that point to the page that the visitor is currently viewing, boosting your user experience and reducing potential page loads.
• Something cool this week: web application exploits and how to defend against them. This codelab provides hands on examples of how to break and patch the security of web applications, allowing you to learn all about potential vulnerabilities.

• Web analytics guru Bryan Eisenberg is back with an interview with Jim Sterne and Avinash Kaushik. Check it out.
• Last week we had the opening of a debate between Brian K and I over the usefulness of Average Time on Page and Average Time on Site. I argued that, due to its measurement methodology neither metric can provide statistically relevant information about user interactions on websites that have high bounce rates, such as blogs. Brian responded by stating that no metric is useless, and gave some examples of how you could use even a flawed metric to develop meaningful insights about posts.

• Elasticpath has a post on a recent MEC 404 page redesign in which a simpler 404 page lead to increased conversion rates, and higher revenue. Unsurprisingly, the winning page made use of big graphics, simple text, and a search field.
• Our friends over at Unbounce have posted on a cool concept: catching bounces. The concept is a little odd, but via email marketing, banner ads, and more you get a chance to suck them back in.

• Eric Fernandez has a visual guide to cognitive biases. At 22 pages, and covering ~100 different biases, it’s quite the guide.