Industry News

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.

Here’s a solid, research-based take on remote work by Paul Taylor. He discusses what type of work is usually more successful when done in person vs. remotely:

If you are doing solid repeatable work, or work that requires intense solo concentration, you can work from pretty much anywhere. If you are in a discovery phase of work, and trying to fuse ideas together from multiple viewpoints remote working might be a hindrance.

It reminds me of a saying I heard somewhere: “In-person is...

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

For the past few months now, Google has been saying there are big improvements coming to address some of the search quality issues we've all been seeing in the Google Search results. Danny Sullivan, Google's Search Liason, wrote yesterday that these improvements "are on the way in the near future."

The Google Search team has made a number of relatively minor changes to its JavaScript documentation and also removed much of the dynamic rendering documentation, as it has been deprecated as a workaround for many years now.