Industry News

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

The Google March 2024 core update is still rolling out, almost 6 weeks now, and we saw two shifts of ranking volatility, both mid-week and the weekend before. Google's Danny Sullivan went on the defensive on search quality and forum listings...

Google is testing another ad format, another card like format, for its search ads. We previously saw the vertical and tall ad cards, then the carousel horizontal card format and now here are just plain horizontal ad cards.

Google was asked if having two websites and Google finding out about them would cause the websites to drop in rankings. John Mueller from Google said that is "not likely," adding that many people have several websites and that is fine.

Gary Illyes from Google said in the recent Google SEO office hours the Google Indexing API may work for unsupported content formats, but that you shouldn't be "surprised if suddenly it stopped working for unsupported verticals overnight."

The topic of using hyphens in domain names is one of the oldest SEO topics we have in this space. Heck, in 2004, SEOs said there was a specific Google ranking algorithm that filtered out domains with hyphens in them (Google did not by the way).

Fabrice Canel from Microsoft announced that BingBot now fully supports Brotli compression and will soon be testing zstd Zstandard compression, a lossless data compression, for its crawler.

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

I don’t agree with everything on this list of how to send progress updates, but these two points are especially important and worth remembering:

Acknowledge changes explicitly. If you said a the last time and b this time, and b conflicts with a, you need to explain the inconsistency. People perceive acknowledged inconsistencies as cost of doing business, but unacknowledged inconsistencies as broken promises.

I name this section “challenges and requests” in my updates, but the...

This isn’t entirely surprising but it’s a sad state of affairs, and it’s worth highlighting not just how, but also where LLMs are being trained:

Hundreds of thousands of hours of work goes into providing enough feedback to turn an LLM into a useful chatbot, and that means the large AI companies outsource the work to parts of the global south, where anglophonic knowledge workers are cheap to hire.

I know it’s too dismissive to call chatbots “fancy autocomplete” like many do, but we...