Industry News

There are some early signs from both the SEO community and the tracker tools that there is a big Google search ranking algorithm update going on. This has not been confirmed by Google, but that is not uncommon. There is some early chatter from within the community and some, not all, of the tracking tools are showing big changes.

Yesterday we reported that Google launched a whole set of new manual actions for Google News and Google Discover. The good news is that Google said a manual action for Google News or Google Discover will not impact how you do in Google Search.

(This is a personal post so if that isn’t your thing then you should move on.)

This is the ninth year that I’ve done a year in review piece. I’m at a different stage of my journey so you might benefit from and find yourself in prior year versions. Here are easy links to 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019

In 2020, the world shifted beneath our feet but my business kept growing. The anxiety I had about certain facets of my business disappeared, replaced by anxiety about...

It looks like Google added a whole set of new manual actions to the list of manual actions. The new ones are for Google News and Google Discover guideline violations.

Google is making some changes to its match types again, this time phrase match will expand to cover additional broad match modifier traffic. However, Google said this will continue "to respect word order when it's important to the meaning." This change will start rolling out over the next two weeks.

SEO A/B testing is limiting your search growth.



I know, that statement sounds backward and wrong. Shouldn’t A/B testing help SEO programs identify what does and doesn’t work? Shouldn’t SEO A/B testing allow sites to optimize based on statistical fact? You’d think so. But it often does the opposite.

That’s not to say that SEO A/B testing doesn’t work in some cases or can’t be used effectively. It can. But it’s rare and my experience is SEO A/B testing is both applied and interpreted...

So the first month of 2021 is now over and it has proven to be an important month. We had Google trickle out a few unconfirmed ranking algorithm updates this month, including confirming rolling out subtopics rankings last year. Google launched a new mobile redesign, did tons of various UI tests and feature launches.

There may have been a smaller and unconfirmed Google search ranking algorithm update that touched down around January 26th but mostly felt on January 27th. I was going to report on it yesterday but more important information came out, so I held this until today. Again, this seems like a smaller update but if you were hit by it, you probably felt it in a big way.

On Friday afternoon, Google announced the beginning of the rollout of its new mobile search results design. I now see this new design and I wanted to share some side by side comparisons of the old versus the new design for queries.

I know I just reported about an unconfirmed Google ranking algorithm update around January 7th and 8th but I think I am seeing signs of another one that started to get noticed January 12th or maybe the day before.