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.

The Google Search ranking volatility won't calm down...

Google will not, refused to, calm down, and the ranking volatility, the shuffling of the search results, remains constant. This weekend, probably starting on Friday, September 27th, through the whole weekend, we are seeing even more signs of movement and volatility.

Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Liaison, has been interviewed again - this time by Alyeda Solis. It is pretty similar to my interview with Google's Search Liason, but this one is recorded and available for everyone to watch.

Earlier this month, we reported that Google was testing a new Google Shopping Search interface. Well, Google may have rolled it out now. There is the new logo, with a more e-commerce like interface and then these large search refinement boxes.

Google seems to be rolling out a new bidding option for Local Service Ads named Target cost-per-lead (tCPL) bidding. Target cost-per-lead (tCPL) bidding is a semi-automated smart bid strategy. You set your desired average cost per lead, and Local Services Ads automatically adjusts bids to aim for that target.

Google may have hit Forbes Advisor with a manual action, downgrading its rankings over maybe the site reputation abuse policy. Lars Lofgren wrote about this marketplace, as he put it, on September 18th and then a week or so later, it looks like it was hit by a Google manual action.

About 8 weeks ago, Google announced Google Search Console Recommendations and rolled it out to a limited number of properties within the platform. Google said the roll out will be slow and yea, it is slow. Daniel Waisberg from Google confirmed on Friday that it is not fully rolled out yet.

This isn’t a new revelation, but it’s helpful to see research to back up how important good managers are:

Managers play a crucial role in shaping an employee’s experience. For example, research shows that nearly 70% of the variability in employee engagement can be predicted by their managers’ behavior, decisions, and personality traits. In other words, whether people are happy, energized, or miserable at work depends mostly on their boss—and whether or not they’re an incompetent manager....

I like this idea from James Stanier on how to make sure that product strategy doesn’t die the moment it’s created:

One way to do this is to create a regular heartbeat for your strategy. The duration of this heartbeat is up to you, but aligning with one of the larger cycles of the year is a good bet: for example, perhaps you could do it quarterly or biannually. The heartbeat is a communication that looks back at the strategy, recaps the key points, and then shows how it has been...

I love everything Mandy Brown writes, but Coming home hit extra hard. I have been becoming increasingly disillusioned with social media to a point where I wish I could just leave it all behind, but I had this idea in my head that because of the work I do, that’s not an option. Mandy managed to articulate my feelings about it so well:

To step into the stream of any social network, to become immersed in the news, reactions, rage and hopes, the marketing and psyops, the funny jokes and...