Industry News

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

There was a lot of Google Search ranking volatility over the weekend again...

What an absolutely wild month in Google Land - between the Google Search API leak, the intense ranking volatility in May, and AI Overviews launching and all the hoopla around that. Let's not forget the ongoing core update, the site reputation abuse, the Search Console bugs and so much more.

Danny Sullivan, Google's Search Liaison, said on X, "you or anyone who shares constructive feedback about our results should not feel like we'd be upset with them." He went on to explain that "complaints and feedback are opportunities."

A bunch of SEOs are now experimenting with how they can show up in the Google AI Overviews, not just remove themselves from AI Overviews. Cyrus Shepard posted a "mini case study" on X, showing how he was able to work his site into the AI Overviews.

Google seems to be testing renaming Google Discover to maybe Google Home or maybe Google Browse. I mean, it is not shocking Google would renamed Discover to something else. Discover was previously named the Google feed and I think before that it was Google Now.

As a reminder, Google has reiterated that when Google receives a search spam report, it does not take direct action against the violation or violating site. Instead, Google uses that feedback to its spam detection systems that hopefully will take action algorithmically in the future against the violation.

I’ve linked to and written about the importance of 1:1 meetings before, and here’s another reminder:

The long game of building a thriving team is in showing up for your people week after week, and intentionally holding that space. You will not always see the value in each 1:1 right away. Your people might need help, too, to understand how to use them effectively. But over the long run, the benefits of an engaged and thriving team are immense.

I’ve been guilty of this before, but I’m...

As someone who is currently reading Slow Productivity and also watching Shōgun, I concur with this point from Austin Kleon:

During a recent phone call, my friend Matt Thomas told me he likes to take a high/low approach to balancing his input, which started when he was in grad school reading dense theoretical texts by day and chasing them with movies like Fast Five at night. I’ve currently got a good combo going: I’m reading Middlemarch and binge-watching Bridgerton. (As the poet Donald...

You don’t say…

Before providing employees with solutions to manage their stress, Fleming recommends that employers do more to tackle the ways in which their business might be causing the stress. A Deloitte survey of US workers, in 2022, found three systemic factors had an “outsized impact” on wellbeing: leadership behaviour; job design; and organisational working practices. It prompted the researchers to conclude that “perks and programmes”, alone, achieve little.

I really like this No Wrong Doors approach, and I think we can learn a lot from it in modern knowledge organizations:

Some governmental agencies have started to adopt No Wrong Door policies, which aim to provide help–often health or mental health services–to individuals even if they show up to the wrong agency to request help. The core insight is that the employees at those agencies are far better equipped to navigate their own bureaucracies than an individual who knows nothing about the...