Industry News

Buckle up - it was one insane month of changes that all SEOs who care about Google need to catch up on. We had very unstable and heated Google search results, Google is testing links in AI-answers in SGE, the Search Console links report is broken and Google News had an indexing bug for three full weeks.

Looks like all the negative feedback around the lack of links within the AI-generated answers that are generated by Google's Search Generative Experience has made a difference. Google is testing links directly in those answers in the SGE results.

Google has posted a new policy saying AI-generated reviews are against its policies, disallowed and considered spam. If you find such content, Google said you must mark it as spam in your feed with the is_spam attribute.

I am seeing a significant increase in chatter from within the SEO community around a possible Google Search ranking algorithm update. While most of the tracking tools have calmed, except for Semrush and Mozcast, I am seeing a big spike in SEO chatter yesterday and into today.

Here’s a great post by Camille Fournier about The Product Culture Shift, and how every part of an engineering culture needs to change when product managers are added to traditional software infrastructure organizations.

To start, let’s be clear about one thing: as tempting as it might be, just hiring product managers won’t fix this problem. Even if you could find enough good product managers who want this type of job, which you can’t, product managers are only useful when they are paired...

Excellent post by danah boyd, reminding us that with social networks it all comes down to nurturing the network dynamics, not the technical features.

That’s the thing about social media. For people to devote their time and energy to helping enable vibrancy, they have to gain something from it. Something that makes them feel enriched and whole, something that gives them pleasure (even if at someone else’s pain). Social media doesn’t come to life through military tactics. It comes to life...