Industry News

While we have still not seen any sites recover from the September 2023 helpful content update, we have seen sites recover from previous core updates. We were hoping by now to see sites recover from that September 2023 helpful content update with this March 2024 core update (since it incorporated the helpful content system in part), but no, not yet.

Google's John Mueller told us again to stop focusing on links and focus more on other things you can do to improve your website. He said this on Reddit, writing, "over-focusing on links will often result in you wasting your time doing things that don't make your website better overall."

Google is testing a new user interface treatment for the Google Ads diagnostic insights view. This new UI highlighted an issue with low ad strength that drove a lot of concern within the PPC community. In short, Ginny Marvin, Google's Ads Liaison, said the ad strength and pinning details are not new, but the treatment for the diagnostics insights is a test.

It looks like Google is rolling out a new Google Business Profiles image uploader as part of the new Google Business Profile management interface. The image uploader interface seems a lot more basic now showing an option to view photos or add photos.

I'll start by saying that was a hard title to write and I hope it makes sense. In short, Google's John Mueller said on X, when it comes to fixing your site that was hit by the helpful content update, "it's not relative to previously, it's basically a re-evaluation of the whole site in the new / current online world & users expectations."

OpenAI has added "more prominent" links to the ChatGPT browses the internet feature. After every section, ChatGPT added a hyperlink to the source, if you are using the browses the internet part of the tool - normal ChatGPT does not do this.

I recently did a first draft of my manager README and I end it with some books and newsletter that have shaped my thinking, and continue to do so. I thought it might be useful to a broader audience so I’m sharing it here as well. These are the books I keep right next to my desk, and the newsletters I open every time they arrive in my inbox. Books that have shaped my thinking Good Authority: How to Become the Leader Your Team Is Waiting for by Jonathan Raymond The Coaching Habit: Say Less,...

For anyone else following along on “The Death of Media”… There are plenty of dire stories about layoffs and newsrooms shutting down, so I like finding stories of innovation (or small steps) in the space that appear to be working. I think 404 Media is doing great work, and their latest addition of a full-text RSS feed for paid subscribers makes me very happy:

Creating this feed was logistically quite complicated. We are thankful to Maxime Valette of FeedPress, who helped us make the feed,...

Some really interesting (and surprising) takeaways in this research, and a very good analysis by Caitlin Dewey in Actually, the internet’s always been this bad:

A team of Italian researchers evaluated more than half a billion comments spanning 30 years, and concluded that online discourse is no more ‘toxic’ today than it was in the early 1990s. […] Overall, the study found that the prevalence of both toxic speech and highly toxic users were extremely low. But the longer any conversation...

Cal Newport writes about some recent research on the impact of social media followers/traffic in Can You Tweet Your Way to Impact? The tl;dr is that audience != impact:

In this narrow look at social media and science a more general lesson about this technology emerges. Maintaining an aggressive presence in these online spaces can increase the number of people who temporarily encounter you or your work. But these encounters are often ephemeral, rarely leading to more serious engagement....