Industry News

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

This week, I posted the monthly Google Webmaster report and we had more search ranking volatility over the weekend. Google Search Console had huge delays...

Google seems to have fixed the Google Search Console Performance Reports last night at about 7:45pm ET. I posted a short update in my story yesterday, but waited until this morning to post a new story that it is fixed because sometimes I've seen it recover and then slip back. But it still seems to be showing recent and fresh data even the next morning.

Google's John Mueller said on that using the request indexing feature in Google Search Console's URL Inspection Tool does not change canonicalization. The question that was asked is if it can help speed up URL removal for a 301 redirected URL.

Do you use a CDN for some or all of your website and you want to manage just one robots.txt file, instead of both the CDN's robots.txt file and your main site's robots.txt file? Gary Illyes from Google said that all you need to do is redirect your main robots.txt to the CDN and control it on the CDN.

Google has made a small update to its image SEO best practices documentation, specific to the "Use HTML image elements to embed images" section. The update seems relatively minor but the changes to the wording was done for a reason.

Google is testing a longer search bar, so I guess you can enter in a longer query into the search box. Google is also testing it in a gray color and other variations.

Charity Majors makes some really interesting points about the consequences of “replacing” junior engineers with AI:

By not hiring and training up junior engineers, we are cannibalizing our own future. We need to stop doing that. People act like writing code is the hard part of software. It is not. It never has been, it never will be. Writing code is the easiest part of software engineering, and it’s getting easier by the day. The hard parts are what you do with that code—operating it,...

I really don’t know how much more data we need about this. It’s almost as if RTO is not about productivity at all…

Bloom and Han reported last week in the journal Nature that, over the subsequent two years, hybrid workers showed no difference in performance grades or promotion prospects compared to office-bound colleagues; the company’s computer engineers, for example, did not differ in their coding output across the two groups.

Hybrid workers, however, reported higher job...

Some solid points in this article from Jason Knight. On product-led vs. sales-led (but could also refer to engineering-led) organizations:

To be honest, my strong opinion is that if you have to worry about who’s “leading” anything, then you’ve got bigger problems to worry about than who’s leading. If your entire company is aligned around what’s important and how to get there, then anyone could “lead” you there. This is supposed to be a collaboration, not a dictatorship. If one team...