Industry News

No matter how well-intentioned you are, enacting change within your first 30 days could jeopardize your trust and standing. So if you feel any of those reasons eating at you, please pause. Spend these first 30 days sitting in on team meetings and talking to everybody on the team.

— Lara Hogan, How to spend your first 30 days in a new senior-level role

John Gruber has some strong B2B product management analysis in Was Salesforce’s Acquisition of Slack a Bust?

I think Slack is to Teams today where Mac OS was to Windows in the mid-1990s: better designed, for sure, but not in a way that makes a difference to the corporate IT decision makers who are making the call on which platform to use.

The key is not merely to be better, on some vectors. The key is to be better on the vectors that people with purchasing power care about....

I see signals, both in terms of SEO chatter and some of the Google Search tracking tools, of more volatility in the Google Search results. The volatility is algorithm update levels and can either be a new Google search ranking algorithm update or it can be the tail-end of the ongoing December 2022 Google helpful content update and link spam updates.

Itamar Gilad recently published a good post on Feature Factories vs. Value Generators. It starts off with some basic definitions that should be familiar to most readers, but the second half expands on the responsibilities product orgs have to ensure a successful transition away from feature factories. We can’t just sit back and hope the rest of the organization goes along—there’s a very important organizational change element here:

The product org needs to stop viewing itself as a...

Danny Sullivan, Google's Search Liaison, said on Twitter on Friday afternoon that the December 2022 helpful content update and December 2022 link spam update may take an additional two weeks to complete. He said it will finish "likely within two weeks, maybe only one, but that's not a guarantee. Timings might change."

I am currently reading Nest creator Tony Fadell’s book Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making. I will likely have some longer thoughts on it once I’m done, but I just finished the chapter on product management and it’s so good that I had to write up some quick highlights and notes. I haven’t read something that made me feel this inspired about the importance of what we do in a long time.

First, it’s always fascinating to me how different people define this undefinable...

As the Google December 2022 helpful content update and link spam update continue to roll out, I am now seeing more signs of volatility and chatter within the SEO industry in the past 24 hours. It seems like there is another algorithm update, or maybe a continuation from the previous ones, taking place on January 3rd and 4th.

Welcome back from the holidays, don't worry; you didn't miss much. The December 2022 helpful content update and December 2022 link spam update are not done yet. They should be done soon, but right now, when I write this, they are not done.

David Hoang wades into the treacherous waters of the Should managers be technical? debate, and IMO comes out safely on the other side. I really like the 3 points he makes towards the end to articulate his point of view. I won’t spoil it because it’s worth reading the whole post. There’s one other bit I wanted to comment on, though:

The key roles of managers are to set expectations, ensure the team is operating efficiently, and maximize the output of the people on your team. In order...

Welcome to 2023, and with that, here is our Google webmaster report for 2023 - where we summarize the bigger Google SEO-related changes in the past month. The big items were the release of the December 2022 helpful content update and the December 2022 link spam update.