Industry News

Google Search is testing various shades of blue for its search header, including a sticky version that, um, sticks as you scroll down the search results. Here are various screenshots from a few folks that I found on X over the past several days.

Did you know that both Danny Sullivan and John Mueller send emails to Google employees on a routine basis? I heard from multiple sources that John sends one weekly, I think maybe on Fridays, and Danny Sullivan shared a screenshot of a portion of the email he recently sent to Google staff on X.

You know an essay is going to be good when this is the preamble:

I am writing this piece in good faith (that you, as a reader, like to think more about the culture that surrounds you, whether it’s culture you love or hate or are ambivalent about) and that you are in turn reading in good faith (that I do not hate Taylor Swift, that this is not a takedown, that we’re talking about Swift’s image but we’re also talking about people’s reaction to that image).

But yes, this is a really...

This is another fantastic post on career development from Johnathan and Melissa Nightingale. This bit really resonated with me:

I want to feel like I’m making progress. And to feel like the various work experiences I’ve had are all building toward a thing. I want to be able to talk about work, not as a string of jobs I’ve done, but as a career.

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

I am seeing signs of a new Google search ranking algorithm update brewing. It started yesterday, Wednesday, February 7th, and is going into today, Thursday, February 8th. There is an increase in chatter within the SEO industry and also some, not all, of the tools are showing spikes in volatility.

Google has this new product or shopping-related box in the search results named "Up-and-coming stores." This box seems to show trendy stores in the Google Search results as a carousel you can swipe through on your mobile phone.

Over the past few days the SEO industry has been chattering it up about how a site received a Google Search manual action for unnatural links for a "legit guest blog" post. But when you look, this manual action only affected "some pages," not the whole site.

Microsoft has stopped fully testing Bing Deep Search in the wild, saying they stopped "flighting" it for searchers. Now Bing Deep Search is in some sort of "shadow flight" to a very limited number of users.

Google has updated its managing crawl budget guide documentation to say that the crawl frequency of the Dynamic Search Ad targets. It use to be every 2 weeks, 14 days, and now it is every 3 weeks, 21 days.