Industry News

Google published on the webmaster blog some tips and advice around doing well in Google News. All of the tips and advice are known and have been published in Google's help docs - which makes you wonder, why is Google putting a new blog post out there that is near duplicate to what Google has published elsewhere?

Over the past 24-48 hours, I've been seeing some chatter amongst the SEO communities, a bit more in the black hat space, but still chatter. Chatter of a Google search algorithm update touching down the past couple of days.

Google just announced an update to the URL Inspection Tool within Google Search Console. It adds the ability to see the page's HTTP response, page resources, JavaScript logs and a rendered screenshot of the page. This is a really useful update and gives webmasters and SEOs more insight into the page itself and how Google sees it.

There are some great product tips in Scott Belsky’s How to Shape Remarkable Products in the Messy Middle of Building Startups, but this part about onboarding particularly stood out for me:

You can’t expect new customers to endure explanation. You can’t even expect customers to patiently watch as you show them how to use your product. Your best chance at engaging them is to do it for them — at least at first. Only after your customers feel successful will they engage deeply enough to...

Yesterday at Search Engine Land I wrote how the Google blog turned off comments and how the nofollow link attribute wasn't able to save even that blog in terms of helping the comments become useful. I then went back in history covering why Google released the nofollow link attribute.

Support is a revenue driver, and a personal touch at scale is a great way to grow a business.

— Nick Francis, The Business Case for Support-Driven Growth

Liz Pelly’s Streambait Pop is a fascinating look at the “Spotify sound” and other changes in pop music brought about by streaming:

The Spotify sound has a few different variations, but essentially it’s a formula. “It has this soft, emo-y, cutesy thing to it,” Matt says. “These days it’s often really minimal and based around just a few simple elements in verses. Often a snap in the verses. And then the choruses sometimes employ vocal samples. It’s usually kind of emo in lyrical...

The Google search results and rankings have been pretty unstable the past week or so. There are a lot of fluctuations happening from earlier this week and also as of yesterday. Both the automated tracking tools and the SEO communities are taking notice.