Industry News

This blog is in a sad state. It was hacked and the recovery process wasn’t perfect.

I should fix it and I should blog more! But my consulting business is booming. And almost all new business comes via referrals. There’s only so much time – that precious finite resource! So I shrug my digital shoulders and think, it’s good enough.

Good enough might cut it for some random blog. But not for a search engine. Yet, that’s what I see happening in slow-motion over the past few years. Google...

It’s been a bit quiet on the blog lately, so I thought I’d bring back the link roundup thing I used to do quite a bit. Here’s some stuff I read and enjoyed recently outside the regular product/business topics I usually write about here…

Very good summary of The OpenAI Keynote by Ben Thompson. This bit stood out to me:

The fact of the matter is that a lot of people use ChatGPT for information despite the fact it has a well-documented flaw when it comes to the truth; that flaw is...

The Google November 2023 core update that started to rollout on November 2nd, Thursday afternoon, has been incredibly volatile, heated and in a very short time. We saw the fluctuations maybe even before Google announced the update and it has been super heated since, throughout this weekend.

Here is the big Google webmaster report for November 2023 and it is a big one. We had two confirmed updates; the October 2023 core update and the October 2023 spam update. Let's not forget all the unconfirmed algorithm updates we had this month.

Only two weeks after the October 2023 core update finished rolling out, we have a new core update rolling out - the November 2023 core update. This is a different update to the core update, Google said "We have different systems that are considered core to our ranking process; this month's core update involves an improvement to a different core system than last month."

Google announced a new reviews update is going to roll out sometime next week and this new update will make the reviews update more real time. Thus Google will stop giving periodic notifications of improvements to its reviews system going forward.

Last night, Google confirmed a bug with the Google October 2023 core update that impacted Discover traffic for "some sites." The bug was started on October 5th and lasted through October 31st.

Google announced that its mobile-first indexing "trek" is now "complete." Which is strange to me being that Google said it was done moving sites to mobile-first indexing last May but hey, now it is really done.

On the heels of the last unconfirmed Google search ranking algorithm update that touched down on October 25th, I am seeing signs of another tremor this morning - October 27th.

Good advice here on when (and when not!) to hire the first product manager in a startup. This is also a good reminder to “let PMs be PMs”…

PMs are the strategy arm of this process, and should be empowered to own the roadmaps for how they’ll better the business, not just the execution of getting things built. In an ideal world, PMs will have better decision-making and execution than you within their domains due to focus and proximity to customer needs. This is how you scale. If you...