Industry News

There is a thread on Reddit asking site owners how they are dealing with the new various Google updates and the associated traffic drops. One Redditor responded that he would go from 500 articles to 5,000 articles written using AI to make up for the traffic drop. In which Google's John Mueller responded, "this is a bad idea."

This is just a friendly reminder that Google will replace First Input Delay (FID) with Interaction to Next Paint (INP) as a Core Web Vital metric tomorrow, Tuesday, March 12, 2024. This has nothing to do with the Google March 2024 Core update that is currently rolling out at the same time, but I am confident this will confuse SEOs even more since "core" is in the name of both of these changes.

Mike Fisher reminds us how important it is for leaders to be excellent listeners in Listen or Speak. This part particularly resonated with me because it’s a misconception about me that I’ve had to deal with my entire career:

Just because we speak softly doesn’t mean we act with hesitancy or indecisiveness. We can be a strong leader, setting the example, and making the tough decisions all the while communicating in a manner that keeps the conversation going and open to other people’s...

Alex Heath has a really interesting interview with Figma’s CEO Dylan Field, covering life at Figma after regulators forced Adobe to abandon its $20 billion acquisition of his company. It covers a wide range of topics, but I wanted to highlight Field’s thoughts on generative AI, which largely matches my own viewpoint:

If I was to zoom out even further to knowledge work, we’re very much in a paradigm of AI as a tool and AI helping people get work done, but it’s not necessarily a...

Today is the first day I have seen solid evidence of serious ranking volatility and changes related to the big Google March 2024 Core Update. As a reminder, the Google March 2024 Core Update officially started on March 5, 2024 and will take up to a month to fully roll out, we are expecting numerous ranking changes during the next few weeks.

Derek Thompson, whose writing for The Atlantic I always appreciate, has a really good article on How Happy Couples Argue (gift link).

The key isn’t that happy couples fight over the right things. Happy couples fight in the right way. In bad conversations and bad fights, both people in the relationship were trying to control each other. Rather than try to control their partners, happy couples were more likely to focus on controlling themselves. They sat with silence more. They slowed down...

Mandy Brown (once again!) cuts through with some tough love advice for all of us:

If you have feedback you want to share but you’re worried about how someone might respond, stop: back up and let go of whatever conclusions or interpretations you’re holding and think about what questions you have. You think someone was rude in a PR, or seemed unprepared in a meeting, or delivered research that was half baked? Set those judgments aside for the moment and practice asking about their own...

In No, but phrased in the form of a question the Raw Signal team gives some great advice about how to handle those seemingly out-of-nowhere senior exec requests as a leader:

The problem is that as you get more senior maintaining productivity and de-risking execution is no longer good enough. Your job is not stability for its own sake. Your job is to make your team an instrumental piece of the organization’s success. And yes, one piece of that is making sure they can focus on their work....

I love Molly Graham’s career advice in Useful:

One of the most important lessons I have learned over and over again is that the greatest thing you can do for your career is to be the person that everyone in the room knows they can rely on to get things done. Be the person that makes everyone else look good. Be the person that everyone wants to work with again. 

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