Industry News

As you know, Google released its first core update in over five months, the Google August 2023 core update, on August 22nd at around 1:30 pm ET. Since then, I've been tracking the volatility and the chatter from within the SEO community to see how widespread, extensive, and impactful this update has been.

Google Search has started to roll out the second broad core update of the 2023 year, and this one is named the August 2023 broad core update. It started on August 22, 2023, at about 1:30 pm ET and as you know, can take about two weeks to roll out.

I fully agree with Chris Coyier’s main point in Other People’s Busted Software is an Opportunity:

If you make software that does work reliably, you’ve got a leg up. Even if your customers don’t tell you “I like your software because it always works”, they’ll feel it and make choices around knowing it.

It feels like so many teams prioritize “innovation” over quality, so we end up getting stuck with products that have an overwhelming number of features but they all barely work—or the...

Since I prefer reading over watching, I appreciate Dave Rupert’s summary of this video about AI/LLM responsibility in his post Uncovering a new class of responsibilities:

Three rules of technology outline their nearly hour long talk: When you invent a new technology, you uncover a new class of responsibilities If that tech confers power, it starts a race If you do not coordinate, the race ends in tragedy

It’s those last steps that are the concerning ones. If we fail to respond to...

Here’s a good reminder that Incidents can’t be prevented, but learned from:

But approaching incidents with a mindset of learning makes it an exciting rather than painful situation. Because you’ll know you’ll never run out of sources for learning. And once you’ve realised what a good source for learning incidents are, it’s maybe even time to take a good look whether shallow incident data like “mean time to detection” and “mean time to resolution” (or the maybe worst offender of all “mean...

I like Tracy Durnell’s Reading Philosophy in 17 Guidelines, especially this one:

Treat my To Be Read list as a stream to dip into, not a to-do list. I know I won’t get to all the books on my TBR.

It reminds me of an article from 2011 that I come back to often—The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We’re All Going To Miss Almost Everything:

Now, everything gets dropped into our laps, and there are really only two responses if you want to feel like you’re well-read, or well-versed in music,...

As I hinted to in my SEO video recap on Friday, we saw some early signing of an unconfirmed Google Search ranking algorithm update starting Friday, August 18th, and it went into Saturday, August 19th.

Google is testing a paid version of customer support for its advertisers who use Google Ads. Google said this is a "paid pilot" where its "smallest customers can receive specialized, one-on-one support, tailored to their specific needs."