Industry News

Google has completed the rollout of the December 2024 spam update after a seven-day rollout cycle. This update started on December 19, 2024 and 12 pm ET, and was completed on December 26, 2024. This was a broad spam update, not a link spam update and was a pretty big and widespread update.

This is lovely post by John Arundel (“Come for the schadenfreude, stay for the thought-provoking advice” indeed!). I especially like the section on how to become a good manager:

If you want to become a great manager, which I think is the only kind worth being, start practicing now. Learn people skills, communication, collaboration, psychology. Work on understanding the things that make different kinds of people tick. Manage yourself excellently. If you can’t organize yourself, how do you...

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.

Google's December 2024 spam update is still heated...

The Google December 2024 spam update seems to have burned through the Christmas holiday, with high volatility on Christmas eve and day. I saw comments from site owners and creators about how devastated they were through the holidays and it was gut-wrenching to read those comments.

Google has relaxed its inconsistent language policy within Google Merchant Center to allow some languages between your product feed and your website language not to match. Google wrote, "we are relaxing the supported language policy to allow some differences between your product feed language and website language."

Apple has issued a motion of intervention in the DOJ vs Google antitrust case, specifically in the remedies side to help Google fight the default search agreement it has with Apple. Why is Apple doing this? Primarily because Apple wants its $20 billions from Google and Apple does not yet want to enter the general search engine space.

There may be a bug impacting some Google Ads advertiser accounts that will quietly switch your campaigns to have broad match turned on, even when that campaign may have used phrase or exact match. This can happen when you switch from non-conversion based bidding to a conversion based bidding strategy.

Every year I like to cover how I spot Googlers, like John Mueller, but yes others, working and communicating with the SEO community on Christmas Eve and Christmas day. This year is no different, with John Mueller, Martin Splitt and even Gary Illyes responding to the SEO community during the holidays.

In Code shufflin’ Robin Rendle writes about why he, as a designer, still messes around with coding projects. I think this is why I continue to obsess over my side project as well—and proactively reach out to indie devs who use the Cloudflare platform to see if I can help.

I’d forgotten what it feels like not to ask permission for changes and instead make pull requests and break things. There’s a momentum to this sort of work that I crave deep down in my bones because it doesn’t rely on...

I love the Murderbot books, and this interview with author Martha Wells is a delight:

Of all her characters, Wells has said, Murderbot is the one she’s put the most of herself into. It’s a surprising claim, until it’s not. It’s obvious that Wells feels a distance from other humans, even as she’s spent a life trying to relate to them, to understand them.

This is a really interesting rebuttal of some modern parenting methods by Marilyn Simon:

The job of the parent is not to prevent any potential “trauma”, it is to love the child even when they are bad, and to punish them, and most importantly to forgive them. A child can’t understand the lightness of forgiveness without understanding first that one needs it.