Industry News

At SMX Next yesterday I have the privilege of interviewing Hyung-Jin Kim, the Vice President of Google Search. Hyung-Jin Kim has been working on search quality for the past 20 years and leads up core ranking at Google Search. He mentioned a few times during the interview the animal Coati and I had to ask what he was referring to.

It seems as if I see more volatility signals on the weekends with Google Search than I do during the weekdays. We may have had another Google search ranking algorithm update, unconfirmed, this weekend, around November 11th and 12th.

Earlier this year Jon Henshaw gushed over federated social. I didn’t quite get it but I managed to create a Mastodon account, which I summarily abandoned until Elon Musk purchased Twitter.

The purchase pushed me to figure out Mastodon (not as hard as you might think) and led me to realize what I’d been missing and just how corrosive current social networks had become. I’ve concluded that today’s social media is a bad batch of Soma made from Soylent Green. Social Media



I’d usually...

Google has done something unusual, it has removed one of the confirmed data anomalies notes about a search features bug, and added a new note confirming a bug with Google Discover logging resulting in a data drop in the Search Console Discover performance reports on October 23rd.

Google has been busy, on Friday morning, November 4th, I began to see new signals of another Google search ranking algorithm update. Over the next 24 hours, those signals escalated and while Google has not confirmed there was an update, there are for sure signs that there was a Google search update.

Google has published on the Search Off The Record podcast, which was a recording from brightonSEO session, where John Mueller of Google said that he believes that over time, links as a ranking factor will be not as important and not as big as a ranking factor as it is today.

The past 30-days or so was pretty heavy between the October 2022 spam update and then several unconfirmed updates that were pretty strong, it was a bumpy road. Google also renamed the webmaster guidelines to the search essentials, rolled out new site name, favicons and ad labels and more.