Industry News

John Mueller, a Google Search Advocate, said on Reddit, that he does not recommend you use generic server or CMS holding pages for new sites. Instead, either "keep DNS disabled or put up a custom holding page."

Google's John Mueller was asked about if it is still okay to use noindex and canonicals at the same time and when to use one or the other. This is a topic we covered several times here over the years but I spotted a new Reddit thread with John's comments on it, so I figured I'd resurrect this topic.

Google Ads had an outage that started at around 3am ET on Tuesday October 1st. The issue is now mostly resolved, but many advertisers were unable to access their Google Ads accounts and campaigns for a few hours this morning.

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....