Industry News

Last week we covered how Google's John Mueller cautioned about using Google Trends for content ideas. Google's John Mueller also agreed that this can be an issue for Google Search's people also ask (PAA) feature. When Glenn Gabe noted PAA falls into this bucket, John Mueller agreed by saying "Definitely them too."

Some are seeing Microsoft placing ads in the Bing Search results mixed in between the organic results. Google has been testing this for a while now, calling it dynamic ad placement to try to make it sound like a good thing, and now Microsoft seems to be testing this in Bing Search as well.

Google Search has been placing trending labels in the search results for a while now. But there is a new variation of that, showing a "Trending this week" label in a gray, green and purple format. I don't think I've seen this label show when the result is trending and for whole long.

On Friday, Google began to show these massive pop up, overlay ads, on top of the Google Search results, for when you search for your business and are logged into your Google Business Profile account. The ad takes up a lot of the screen, blocks access to the search results page (and managing your Google Business Profile) and asks you to spend money with Google Ads with a Google Ads credit promotion.

Google has been telling us for many months that they will be rolling out ads for AI Overviews. Last month, Google said they will soon show in the US mobile search results - well, I think we've seen one of our first examples of it this weekend.

Google Analytics may not have fully brought in your analytics data for Wednesday, November 13th, within the GA4 interface. Over the past few days, I've seen complaints from site owners and marketers about GA4 missing data from that day.

Lots of great planning advice in this First Round article. There are two things related to Strategy that I especially like. First, this definition (Strategy is not a vague vision statement!):

Strategy is the sequencing of how you take a very long-term end goal and break that down into more digestible components. Done right, it gets you a really clear picture of what’s in your long-, mid-, and short-term plans, where you stack up in the market, and how you’ll win.”

And then, the...

The Google November 2024 core update started rolling out Monday, November 11, at 3:30 pm ET and we saw some movement begin around Wednesday/Thursday but it was not that widespread. Now, over the weekend, this core update seems to be casting a wider net.

James Stanier has a good argument for why deadline-driven development is so… difficult:

Given that non-technical people don’t understand why software is hard, dates become the stick that they beat you with when you don’t deliver on time. Don’t ask me why, it’s just human behavior. I’m sure you’ve done it when roadworks have taken longer than were specified on the sign, or if a delivery of a package was late. Dates mean something to people, so handle them with care. In fact, perhaps we...

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