Industry News

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

Josephine Conneely shared some thoughts that might seem controversial in The Alignment Fallacy. The basic premise is that the need for full alignment within a team can sometimes hide some deeper problems within an organization:

The need for complete explicit agreements in organisations can reveal a culture which requires you to be on defense (a cover your a*s culture if you will). Alternatively, it can be driven by a culture which suffers from being too collaborative (it happens). Plans...

Austin Kleon has a really interesting post on the word “meek” in the Beatitudes. In short, “meek” doesn’t mean “weak”:

Meekness as a habit of calm attentiveness, stillness, freedom from the fretting worry of keeping control, a stillness that allows others to feel welcome around you, can appear as something very different from the shrinking back that the word so easily suggests. If anger is very much to do with the “pushing out and pushing away” element in our psyche, “meekness” in the...

I found the article I Asked Experts for Tips to Navigate LinkedIn’s Cringe Factor surprisingly helpful, not just for its advice but also because it articulates well why LinkedIn can feel so weird sometimes:

LinkedIn users are trapped in a culture of professionalism and all that comes with it. The person you are with your boss or a client is probably not your truest self. This setting makes posting — or even just creating and maintaining a profile — feel extra high-stakes and, in turn,...

I wouldn’t want to work in an environment like this because even though delivery is a fun part of building product, I find that for most PMs it’s so much more fulfilling (and you usually get better results!) when they are part of strategy and discovery as well. That said, I’m now long enough into this product journey to recognize that as long as you have a team of people who love execution and are excellent at it, this is a completely valid way to build a company:

We changed this model...

Google's Search Liaison responded to a series of posts on Twitter, leading him to beg SEOs to stop trying to "show Google" things, explaining that the process of doing things to your site to rank better in Google is the opposite of the advice Google is giving. Instead, show things to your users/visitors that those people will like.

On Friday, Google began to test SGE-based AI overviews in the real Google search results. That means you may see AI overview snapshot answers in Google search results without being opted into the Google search labs experiment. This is being tested on a small subset of searchers based in the U.S., Google told me.

A couple of weeks ago, Gary Illyes and Lizzi Sassman of Google had Dave Smart as a guest on the Search Off The Record podcast and they spoke about crawling. In one part, they said again that the quality of your site can impact how fast and how much Google will crawl your website.

Google is now testing placing "product sites" as its own search bar filter tab in the search results. Also, Google is testing replacing "Shopping" with "Products" in that search bar.

Let's say you have a subdomain of a subdomain, such as sub.sub.domain.tld, how do you remove sub.sub.domain.tld from Google while keeping sub.domain.tld in the Google search results. The answer is to verify the sub.sub.domain.tld property directly in Search Console and remove just that property.