Industry News

Google has officially confirmed the launch of the second release of the Google helpful content update/system. It started lightly on December 5th but became noticeable, according to Google, on December 6th, which is why Google did not announce it until the 6th. This update adds new signals, most notably making it work for all languages globally - it is not just looking at English content anymore.

Every Monday, I end up covering an unconfirmed Google search ranking algorithm update but this past week, going into the weekend, was even more volatile than the others. I am seeing way more chatter, and even the tools are showing heavier volatility than the normal high volatility.

Welcome to the big Google Webmaster Report for December 2022, the last one for the 2022 year. It was a fun 30 days or so; we learned a lot. The VP of Google Search, Hyung-Jin Kim, told us E-A-T is used everywhere and that there was a Coati algorithm that replaced Panda.

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."