Industry News

There is a large thread in the Google Analytics help forum with complaints from site owners of being flooded with fake referral traffic originating from Poland. This seems to be the typical referral spam issue and it started around February 17th or so.

The importance of async work and cutting down on meetings to allow for more Deep Work time won’t be new to regular readers of the blog. And yet I can’t resist sharing yet another article about it… How Asana and Slack’s meeting purges have paid off has the usual methods and recommendations in it (although “Meeting Rest” is a new one to me—read the article for details).

Instead what I want to focus on here is a few pull quotes about the results companies report once they were able to...

I am seeing some massive volatility being reported today after seeing a spike in chatter within the SEO community on Friday. I have not seen the third-party Google tracking tools show this much volatility in a long time. I will say, the tracking tools are way more heated than the chatter I am seeing, so something might be off here.

I’ve been digging into different ways to structure engineering teams a bit, and I like this take on the different roles of Engineering Managers and Engineering Leads:

It became obvious that in most cases it’s too much for one person to manage people (growth, performance and motivation), along with driving technical execution. At the same time, in most teams, we had one or more senior developers on whom Tech Lead could rely and delegate architecture decisions, quality, mentorship, etc… We...

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 is now paying Reddit for its content...

Google spoke more about the time it takes to recover from a helpful content update and then said it is up to you to decide ice what old content is helpful or not. Google said it wants to reward the best content no matter the site size...

Google Ads announced that within Performance Max the search ad company is rolling out asset generation globally in English with more languages to come. Plus, image editing will finish rolling out in the U.S. in March, with global English expansion following shortly after. This means that Google is adjusting its Ad Strength formula to weigh asset quantity and variety more than it use to.

The topic of removing or updating or blocking old content from Google is not new, and we covered it countless times. I saw John Mueller of Google comment about it again, this time on Reddit, saying, it is up to you to decide which of your old content is helpful and useful - it is not up to Google to decide that.

Google has announced a deal with Reddit to gain access to its content using the Reddit Data API reportedly worth $60 million annually. Yes, Google is paying Reddit to get access to its publicly available content through an API that should make it faster for Google to consume and show us all that content. Not that any of us want to see Reddit content show up in Google Search...

Google released version 16 of the Google Ads API yesterday. The update includes additional recommendation types, support for time-related segments, support for advertiser verification, plus much more.