Industry News

Mike Monteiro isn’t always everyone’s cup of tea, but I really like his views in Design Ethics & the Truth About Who Designers Really Work For. In short, designers need to work for users:

When you hire me as a designer, I do not work for you. I may practice my craft at your service, but you haven’t earned the right to shape how I practice that craft. One, you don’t want me designing at your level, you want me designing at mine, which means you don’t get to pull the strings. I do. Two,...

I was going to cover the chatter and signals of a Google update this past Friday on Friday but when the Search Engine Land spectacle touched down, I decided to wait it out and see how things settle over the weekend. There are still strong signs both in terms of community chatter and tracking tools around a Friday, November 30th update.

15 years ago today was the first time I wrote a blog post on this site, the Search Engine Roundtable. Since then I have continued to write daily, almost without any time off, every single day of the work week. It is a passion I had no clue would last for 15 years, but I continue to love doing on a daily basis.

I woke up this morning to probably close to a hundred messages across email, social media and other channels that Search Engine Land is not currently in the Google Index. People want to know why. I honestly do not know why. I do not have access to the code base or Google Search Console access.

There are a nice number of SEOs and webmasters in the forums claiming they saw huge changes in terms of their rankings in Google starting on November 22nd or so. Since it was Thanksgiving day and traffic is always off on holidays, I wanted to wait it out. But there are many claims of an update, possibly a reversal of the Medic Update for some that were originally hit.

This is not a joke, Google has officially launched showing zero search results - yes, showing no actual search results - for a some very specific types of queries. When someone searches for time/date, conversion or math related answers - Google may just show the answer with a button to click to see the search results.

I am seeing some early signs that there may be a Google search algorithm update rolling out this morning. There is some early chatter in some of the forums and some, not all, of the automated tracking tools are also showing changes.

I feel like Google has to spend more time telling SEOs to stop obsessing about specific details then helping with technical SEO issues and I called it with this one. Google's John Mueller had to say in this mornings hangout "quality rater guidelines is not one-to-one our ranking algorithm."