Industry News

The Google August 2023 Broad Core update finished rolling out yesterday afternoon at about 4:03 PM ET. It took just over 16 days to roll out, kicking off on August 22, 2023, at about 1:30 pm ET and completing on September 7, 2023, at about 4:00 PM ET.

How to Scale Yourself Down has some really interesting advice on how to go from leading a team at a bigger company to rolling up your sleeves at a startup. A couple of my favorite quotes:

Avoid process out of practice. Leaders who are successful in a startup are the ones who naturally reinvent their own toolboxes, and question what the process is trying to accomplish before establishing something that might be too heavyweight.

However, process is a double-sided coin. “There’s often an...

There’s a concept in UX design that I’ve been thinking about a lot in the context of interpersonal work relationships. It’s called “The 9x Effect” and I wrote about it… checks watch… 10 years ago. In short (and heavily simplified), customers value their existing solution/product 3x more than any new “innovation”, and companies overvalue their innovative new product by 3x of what’s currently in the market. So you end up with a 9x mismatch between what companies build and what people believe...

I came across a couple of really helpful articles recently about how to start a new job well. 30 Tips for New Startup Employees is a long and super useful read—and not just relevant for startups:

Align yourself with the risks of the company. If you’re an engineer but the company is not acquiring customers fast enough, spend your time in marketing. Have range, and don’t try to be too narrow in your focus in the early days. Gain knowledge in a few different areas of the business so you can...

We are expecting Google to announce that the Google August 2023 core update has been completed any minute now. But yesterday, I believe we saw another wave of volatility, maybe the final wave of fluctuations before Google calls this update as being done.

It is time for the big Google Webmaster Report, the September edition. This past month, we finally had a confirmed update, the August 2023 core update that was announced on the 22nd but began being felt on the 25th. We also had a couple of unconfirmed Google updates. Google SGE officially rolled out links.

On August 22nd, Google released the August 2023 core update. We did not feel much of any volatility until a few days later, on August 25th. Then we had some movement on that Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and then it died down for a couple of days, picking up again a few days ago.

I didn’t realize that there’s a strategy backlash going on in some corners of the internet, but Packy McCormick has a good defense of the importance of having a good strategy:

Execution without strategy is wasteful and tragic. Just as “Companies that have the best products, most talented people, and fastest growth are precisely the ones for which moats are most important,” companies that are the best at execution are precisely the ones for which strategy is most important. They’re the...

After testing three different formats for links within the Google Search Generative Experience and then pausing that test a few weeks later, Google has officially decided to go with the arrow-down buttons that reveal links to web pages as cards.

I’m on a bit of a break right now (LinkedIn update here if you’re interested), and while I’m figuring out how to spend my time wisely I’ve been reading a lot of sci-fi. The latest book I finished—and really enjoyed—is Ascension by Nicholas Binge:

An enormous snow-covered mountain has appeared in the Pacific Ocean. No one knows when exactly it showed up, precisely how big it might be, or how to explain its existence. When Harold Tunmore is contacted by a shadowy organization to help...