Industry News

While I was offline, it seems we had two bouts of Google Search ranking volatility, one starting around Wednesday, October 23rd and 24th, and then again in the past 24 hours, starting on October 26th and 27th. I mean, this is a lot of the same as my previous Google Search ranking algorithm update coverage.

This is another amazing AHP essay, this time about the critiques of Gen Z employees:

I’ve long argued that the critique of younger generations is a sublimated critique of a generation’s own parenting and child-rearing practices: no one wants to admit that the decisions they made (or tacitly endorsed) are responsible for the type of worker they find objectionable. But that sort of introspection requires, well, work.

It’s well worth reading the whole thing, but I also wanted to...

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Google said it does not use ARIA for SEO or ranking purposes. Google said AI is not going away...

This week, we had more Google search ranking volatility to report on - surprise...

Google Search likely does not use ARIA Accessible Rich Internet Applications, for ranking or even indexing purposes, according to both John Mueller and Martin Splitt at Google. ARIA is a set of attributes you can add to HTML elements that define ways to make web content and applications accessible to users with disabilities who use assistive technologies (AT).

Google's John Mueller posted his thoughts on AI, which were two fold. (1) AI is not going away, so he doesn't recommend you take a stance against AI and (2) he isn't a fan of all the hype around AI, because it is making many feel insecure about their future.

Google Discover is rolling out some small design updates to its interfaces. It has these new colored icons that communicate the action and Google is also showing other articles shown in a carousel.

Google is showing a section named "top recipe guides" that can be expanded or collapsed in Google Search. It shows a "Lists of options from the web" in this expanded section.

Google is testing another variation of the people also ask box, this one is titled "other people search." I am not sure if there is any functional or technical difference between this box and the other variations outside of the title.

I spent the day at Lenny’s Summit with over 1,000 other product people. The line-up of talks was fantastic, but you never know how it’s really going to go. I am happy to say that the hit rate of good talks was quite a bit higher than some other conferences I’ve been to. I tried to write detailed notes, and below are my summaries and takeaways from 4 of the talks that I enjoyed the most.

There were also a couple of interviews that were really great—Lenny interviewing Shreyas Doshi, and...