Industry News

Yesterday I asked So where should we post now? and I think I made a decision. Well, for now. All decisions are reversible, after all.

After publishing Elezea on and off for 13 years I’m going to stop splitting my attention and move all my writing and sharing to the Elezea Newsletter. It’s hosted on Substack right now, but it might not always be—which is one of the nice things about being on a platform that lets you take your readers with you when you leave. Reversible decisions! (I hear...

In Google has a company strategy, not a product strategy Jackie Bavaro argues that instead of product strategies, Google has… this:

Google’s company strategy is “Hire all the smart people.” Hire all the smart people and let them build. Hire all the smart people so they can’t work at a competitor. Hire all the smart people even if we don’t have something important for them to work on.

She goes on to argue that this is the main reason so many of Google’s products get shut down:...

I like Adam Thomas’s idea of identifying “survival metrics” at the start of a project. It’s a way to help teams stay grounded throughout the project and ask themselves whether they should stop the project, pivot in a different direction, or continue to invest in completing the project. From What Are Survival Metrics & How Do They Work?:

Survival metrics help a product team determine if an initiative is worth investing in more, pivoting or stopping completely. They are a forcing...

I’m sure I am not the only one who is currently re-evaluating where I spend my time online. Two tangentially related articles gave me lots of food for thought on this topic over the past couple of weeks. First, Dave Rupert makes this point in It takes one person to knock down a silo:

Wherever you end up I want to offer an idea; you are the value. Your ideas, your insights, your compassion, your ability to help someone in need, your dumb puns and dank memes; that’s what’s valuable....

It has now been 19 years that I've been writing on this site, covering what you - the search marketers are talking about from within the search community. Today marks the 19th anniversary of the Search Engine Roundtable.

Michael Liedtke’s Netflix nights still come wrapped in red-and-white envelopes is a lovely post about the people who still get DVDs delivered via Netflix:

“When you open your mailbox, it’s still something you actually want instead of just bills,” said Konkle, a resident of Savannah, Georgia, who has been subscribing to Netflix’s DVD-by-mail service since 2005.

But the end of an amazing era is upon us:

When—not if—it happens, Netflix will shut down a service that has...

Duy Nguyen from Google's search quality team said in the Google office hours video that "backlinks as a signal has a lot less significant impact compared to when Google Search first started out many years ago."

Duy Nguyen from Google's search quality team said in the Google office hours video that Google has "algorithms to go after" those who post AI plagiarized content, he the algorithms can "demote site scraping content from other sites."

For the past several weekends, I've been reporting about a Google search ranking algorithm update that hit on a Friday and continued throughout the weekend. Well, last weekend was the Thanksgiving holiday in the US and I did see some signs of a possible Google Search ranking algorithm update - but truth is, it is unlikely that Google pushed something out on a Friday of Thanksgiving.