Industry News

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."

Since I posted about the the story the other day that Google does not use the BBB, Better Business Bureaus score or reviews as well as other third-party trust sites in their ranking algorithm it caused a lot of interesting and unexpected debate in the SEO industry. John Mueller from Google was asked again and he said they are not used as direct ranking factors in Google search this morning.

Google seems to have just rolled out a redesign for their Google PageSpeed Insights tool. The new design shows a lot more graphical reporting, the speed score uses lab data analyzed by Lighthouse and Google is showing a lot more detail. In addition, scores that I had at over 90, some are down to 50 or so. So things have changed with this report.

Chris Jones describes his favorite product manager interview question, but in the spirit of “know thyself” I think this is an exercise everyone should go through for themselves:

The question comes late in the interview, but early in the overall hiring process. The setup goes like this: “Now that I know you a bit, I’d like to give you a list of 4 broad work attributes. You’re a product manager, so I already expect that you’re strong in each. But I highly doubt that you consider...