Industry News

If you’re a fan of the Murderbot series (and if you haven’t read it, get on it!) you will absolutely love this recent keynote speech by author Martha Wells at the annual Jack Williamson Lecture at Eastern New Mexico University. She describes how Murderbot came to be, what it’s really about, and where the story sits within sci-fi and our world in general:

There are a lot of people who viewed All Systems Red as a cute robot story. Which was very weird to me, since I thought I was writing a...

As I mentioned briefly in my Friday video recap, I was starting to see renewed chatter on Friday morning around more Google search ranking volatility. I spotted some renewed chatter that lead through Friday, into Saturday and today. So I figured I'd cover it and share some of what SEOs are saying over the weekend.

I admit that I love post-apocalyptic books and movies. So I feel more than a little bit chastised by ‘End of the world vibes’: why culture can’t stop thinking about apocalypse:

“Such convictions in the mouths of safe, comfortable people playing at crisis, alienation, apocalypse and desperation, make me sick,” complains the protagonist of Saul Bellow’s 1964 novel Herzog. “We must get it out of our heads that this is a doomed time, that we are waiting for the end, and the rest of it …...

Michał Poczwardowski shares a good reminder about how to set expectations well in our teams:

The biggest partner in crime for missed expectations is unclear communication, which means that the antidote is clear communication. Follow these steps to make sure that expectations are clear: Be realistic about the future. Overconfidence will build up expectations. If there are a lot of uncertainties, state clearly what is certain and what is uncertain. Point out what you don’t know. Give as...

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."