Industry News

Google's John Mueller said again this morning that sites hit by the old September helpful content update or even new core updates can recovery. He said on X and on LinkedIn that it is possible to recover but it is not a simple change you can tweak on your website, but rather it takes a lot of effort, over time, to recover.

Over the past week, many have been windblown by Statcounter reporting that Google lost significant market share in the US and worldwide from March to April 2024. It turns out it was some sort of reporting bug and Statcounter has updated the data over the weekend.

Google's John Mueller said on X that he believes Google will remove the disavow link tool "at some point" in the future. Bing dropped the disavow links tool from Bing Webmaster Tools in September 2023 and I suspect Google will also drop it from Google Search Console.

Google Search seems to be testing showing only local listings from Google Business Profiles for many "near me" types of queries. So when you search for [dentist near me] or [indian food near me] and so on, you only get local listings and no web search results.

A year ago, Google Gemini (formerly known as Bard) began linking to sources as citations and we rejoiced. Well, it looks like in most cases, Gemini has stopped linking to sources. I believe this started about a week or so ago but I am not sure on the timing.

The new AI advanced version of Google Search, aka Google SGE or Search Generative Experience, provides wicked smart AI answers to your queries. And if you ask it how to pass kidney stones quickly, Google will tell you to drink at least two quarts of urine every 24 hours.

In Crazy Charlie’s Window Michael Lopp says something that has stuck with me for a couple of weeks now (emphasis mine):

The reason, decades later, I frequently think of this unpaid weekend adventure sifting through a year of garbage, hardware, and knick-knacks is because it is when I discovered the compounding non-obvious value from doing exceptional work.

It’s a great story, well worth reading. Matthew Ström makes this point in a slightly different way in The polish paradox (again,...

Melissa and Johnathan Nightingale have some hard truths about what happens when leaders take on too much of their team’s workloads in If you’re doing their job, who’s doing your job?

But now we have an overwhelmed team working for an overwhelmed boss. This is where cheap problems go to get expensive. You are chronically unavailable because you’re slammed. Your team can’t get your attention on a thing so they make their best guess. Their best guess turns out to be wrong. All the work...

Will Larson really got me thinking with his advice on the best ways to push your organization to improve. It’s essential work, but “organizations can only absorb so much improvement at a given time before they reject the person providing the feedback.” We have to balance the feedback about how to improve with guidance on how operate within the existing environment:

When I focused on how the environment could change to make my team more successful, I was usually technically correct, but...

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...