Industry News

I like this idea from Lorin Hochstein about focusing more on the almost-incidents in our products:

Because most of our incidents are novel, and because near misses are a source of insight about novel future incidents, if we are serious about wanting to improve reliability, we should be treating our near misses as first-class entities, the way we do with incidents.

I imagine that a culture of “post near-incident reviews” could be really beneficial for the resiliency of our...

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...

Yep, we are seeing more Google search ranking volatility mid-week. I posted the monthly Google webmaster report for February. Google Ads has a new quality update that accounts for user navigation experience...

John Mueller from Google wrote on Bluesky, "and let's be honest, people can tell when author bios are used purely as an SEO tactic. It's kinda awkward, not reassuring." This was in response to a post from Nikki Pilkington who said "Stop treating author bios as an SEO tactic and start treating them as what they are '" a tool for building trust with your actual human readers."

Google Ads has a new feature in the keyword planner tool that will auto-organize new keywords into ad groups for you. This feature will take your new keywords and auto-organize them into keyword ideas in ad groups.

Google has updated its Google Business Profiles reinstatement emails to now include the case number on the first appeal email. Plus, Google added five proof upload boxes to upload more evidence for Google to review.

I am seeing a ton of complaints in the Google Business Profiles forums about reviews going missing. A lot of people are saying the review counts have dropped from one number to a lower number.

In December, we reported that Google was experimenting with something they call AI Mode. Well, now, we have more details and even screenshots of AI Mode in Google Search.

Google added a new developer document and video explanation on how to use Google Analytics data and Google Search Console data together. One of the biggest confusions I see is when people try to compare the data between those two analytics tools - they measure different things in different ways.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...