Industry News

Thanks to April Dunford for this fantastic reminder about positioning (and life!):

My favorite positioning quote is from Dolly Parton, who said, “Find out what you are and do it on purpose.” A great positioning exercise is a structured process that allows a team to get real clarity on exactly “what you are” so marketing and sales can “do it on purpose.”

Come to her article for the Dolly Parton quote, stay for the Beyoncé positioning lesson…

Here’s a quick thought about ramping up on something new as a product manager.

If I don’t understand how something works in an organization, I do two things. I ask questions, and I draw boxes and arrows based on the answers. People sometimes make fun of me for this, but hear me when I say that nothing gets people aligned like a systems diagram they can disagree with.

B2C, B2B, Platform, Internal… the industry/product type doesn’t matter. Draw the flow of information through your...

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

This week, we covered that the Google March 2024 core update is still rolling out 38 days later, but we saw more volatility this week. Just a reminder that the Google helpful content update no longer exists. Gary Illyes from...

Google once again said that its indexing systems are completely independent of its ranking updates, like the core update. Gary Illyes from Google said indexing, canonicalization, and those types of "systems are independent" of core updates.

Google has made some changes to its new Structured data carousels (beta) documentation to list the feature availability of this carousel and also to clarify where to place the markup. Google wrote the "markup must be on the summary page, and you don't need to add markup to the detail pages in order to be eligible for this feature."

John Mueller from Google said that ranking well in the Google Shopping or Google Image vertical boxes does not impact your ranking in the core web results. He said, "I can't imagine that they'd be connected" when asked about how ranking well in the Merchant Center results can impact the web results.

Google is testing a "mentioned" button that shows other people mentioned in the knowledge panels in the Google Search results. We saw variations of "mentioned by" in Google Discover and Explore but now we are seeing something similar in knowledge panels.

Google has updated the Suggest an edit feature within Google Maps business listings. Google said the new flow is "easier" and should help make updates to the Google Maps data.

Last week marked the first-ever official Google SEO-focused event in Romania '" Search Central Live Romania '" on a sunny 4th of April in Bucharest. As a Search Central Product Expert who lives in Bucharest, the event made for an exciting occasion for people from my local SEO community to listen to and interact directly with Googlers...