Industry News

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

There seems to be a bug right now with Google Search not showing the local pack results right now. I suspect it will be fixed really soon. Searches that trigger local packs that show business profiles in the search results are not triggering the local pack in Google Search.

Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Liaison, wrote on X, "Another thing to keep in mind is that some of the sites I've looked into, where someone thinks they have a helpful content issue -- they're fine." Meaning, those sites may have seen competitors see a lift and jump up ahead of them but their traffic is down because of the competition ranking better, not because of any unhelpful content issues.

Google Ads is beta testing a new feature, a new button, in the Google Ads console named "Spacing." This is a feature that is available for individual advertiser accounts and not rolling out as a beta to MCC accounts.

Google has released its new Google Maps and local spam fighting numbers for the 2023 year, citing a big lift in reviews and other local fraud that was blocked. Google credited a new machine learning algorithm and its spam-fighting team for the improvements.

It seems Google has no plans to build a mobile app for Search Console in the near future. John Mueller of Google was asked about the possibility and he responded on LinkedIn, "I don't see this happening again anytime soon."

The Google Ads team is sending out a new email series that promises "customized" steps you can take to "optimize your clients' Google Ads campaigns." Google says these emails will provide recommendations, save you time and provide direct links to take action.

Google has updated the Google Business Profiles requirements for ordering or delivery providers to require them to add instructions on how to remove that service from a Google local listing.

I like Jason Knight’s take on 5 Different Types of Debt That Can Hinder Your Product Organization. There’s the usual “tech debt” advice, of course, but also some good insight on other types of debt to look out for, such as…

Revenue debt builds up as companies scale up through unstructured sales-led growth, selling to anyone they can, meaning that they start to build dependencies on a disparate set of customers who have sometimes substantially different needs. This makes focusing, or even...

This post is like watching “Portlandia” as a Portlander (or HBO’s “Silicon Valley” as a tech worker). It’s obviously satire but too close to reality to be funny… My Comments Are in the Google Doc Linked in the Dropbox I Sent in the Slack:

You still don’t see the link? It’s right there on the bottom of the Slack thread from yesterday about which shared drive folders link to Dropbox folders that contain all the shared PDFs. Oh, my mistake; it’s actually at the bottom of a thread about what...