Industry News

Google is appealing the ruling that it is an illegal search monopoly - which surprises no one. Plus, Google asked the court to pause the remedies during the appeal phase.

Google's John Mueller once again warned about hosting your website on free subdomain hosting service because they are magnets for a "lot of spam & low-effort content."

OpenAI announced on Friday it will begin testing ads in the ChatGPT responses in the coming weeks. The ads will show on the free product and low-cost subscription tier, ChatGPT Go. The ads will show under the main response and not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you. Advertisers will not get conversations with ChatGPT. The ads will be clearly labeled as ads.

Google's John Mueller said that link spam left in the comments section have no effect on Google Search or SEO, (and maybe even your website's performance in Google Search?). He wrote on Bluesky, "These links all have no effect - they're from spammers dropping links into comments. These would not have any effect, positive nor negative, on your site."

Jason Knight wrote about a fascinating disconnect between how B2B product leaders rate themselves and how their teams see them. The data from his survey is striking:

Across the board, B2B Product Leaders think they’re doing pretty well in all of these areas, but B2B IC PMs are not convinced. The difference is stark, and they can’t both be right.

The survey measured six core responsibilities—setting strategy, aligning teams, enabling prioritization, fostering ownership, removing...

Daniel Parris wrote a statistical analysis of when rock became “classic rock”, and it’s not the story I expected.

He assumed the genre emerged organically from music nerds debating on message boards and in the pages of Rolling Stone. Instead:

What I found was a deliberate realignment engineered by music executives chasing an ephemeral advertising demographic. Like many entertainment industry decisions, it was a small (mostly male) group of executives quietly deciding the future of...

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

I am seeing new signs of yet more Google Search ranking volatility and a possible tweak to the ranking search algorithm. Something kicked off yesterday, January 15th, that the third-party tools picked up on. With this update, there is limited chatter, unlike the previous unconfirmed Google Search ranking update.

It is another week and more Google Search ranking volatility but this was a weird one. Google launched Personal Intelligence in the Gemini app and it is coming to AI Mode in Google Search. Google AI Mode new ad format...

Rajan Patel, the VP of Engineering for Search, said on X that Google is making "changes to ranking" to remove prediction content from showing up in the Google Search top stories and news sections. This comes after some sites are posting "prediction" content, predicting that some sports trades may happen, that have not happened yet, and those "stories" show up in the news section as actually having occurred.