Industry News

With the Google Medic Update from August 1st, the core broad Google algorithm update. Many are not just looking at the quality raters guidelines but also looking back at the advice former head of search Amit Singhal gave around the Google Panda update from May 2011.

Even though more and more companies are getting comfortable with remote work, the field of product management still seems to push back against this trend quite forcefully. There is a general sense that product managers can’t do the things they need to do unless they are physically located with their teams. This has some ironic consequences, such as that Slack — a company that builds a tool “where work happens” — doesn’t hire remote employees.

I confess that at first I was skeptical as...

Cal Newport has some thoughts on the “digital ethics” movement. In his post Beyond Digital Ethics he argues that large companies will never turn their backs on revenue just because it’s “the right thing to do”:

Instead of quixotically convincing some of the most valuable business enterprises in the history of the world to behave against their interests, we should convince individuals to adopt a much more skeptical and minimalist approach to the digital junk these companies peddle....

As you know, the Google Medic update was pretty big and Google'a advice is there is no fix. But that does not mean you should sit on your hands and just wait it out. You need to work harder, make your site better or just give up altogether but don't sit idle and expect your rankings to get better without doing anything.

Google has confirmed that the Google core algorithm update that we named the Medic Update is now fully rolled out. But the SEO community noticed a lot of fluctuations and ranking changes yesterday as well.

Two lofty but surprisingly insightful Twitter think-pieces caught my attention this week. The first is Jennifer Senior’s description of it as The High School We Can’t Log Off From:

A few years back, the sociologist Robert Faris described high school to me as “a large box of strangers.” The kids don’t necessarily share much in common, after all; they just happen to be the same age and live in the same place. So what do they do in this giant box to give it order, structure? They divide...

The big core Google search algorithm update is being named the Google Medic Update. The reason for this name is because it seemed to be heavily targeting the health and medical space based on our survey data.

Don Norman attempts to explain Why bad technology dominates our lives:

Curiosity is, on the whole, a virtue. We have evolved to be curious. Our nervous system is especially sensitive to change, and changes in the environment attract attention. But the technology-centered view labels this natural, creative trait as a liability: Curiosity is renamed as distraction. A human virtue is now turned into a liability.

Worse, many businesses have learned to exploit our curiosity. The...

Nikhil Sonnad writes that Everything bad about Facebook is bad for the same reason:

Underlying all of Facebook’s screw-ups is a bumbling obliviousness to real humans. The company’s singular focus on “connecting people” has allowed it to conquer the world, making possible the creation of a vast network of human relationships, a source of insights and eyeballs that makes advertisers and investors drool.

But the imperative to “connect people” lacks the one ingredient essential...

The big core Google search algorithm update seems to start slowing down. The rollout might be ending soon, now after a 5 or so day rollout. Now that things are settling down, it might be a good time to see how you were impacted.