Industry News

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...

Currently, Bing Webmaster Tools will give you up to six months of data, but Microsoft may extend that up to 24 months. Fabrice Canel from Microsoft said on X, "We will consider extending to 2 years."

Imagine you pay for an advertisement, someone then clicks on that ad and is then able to see local competitors. Is that ad worth buying? Well, Google Local Service Ads that bring up your Google Business Profile can show nearby competitors in your Business Profile listing.

The updated Google Search Quality Raters guidelines last week and added an example of that it considers the "lowest quality pages." In section 4.7 it states the only mention of using AI and writes, "The website terms of use states that "some articles" are generated by artificial intelligence and may have errors or be out of date; there is no indication to which pages this statement applies. The information in this article is not trustworthy and is Lowest E-E-A-T."

There is a thread on Reddit asking site owners how they are dealing with the new various Google updates and the associated traffic drops. One Redditor responded that he would go from 500 articles to 5,000 articles written using AI to make up for the traffic drop. In which Google's John Mueller responded, "this is a bad idea."

This is just a friendly reminder that Google will replace First Input Delay (FID) with Interaction to Next Paint (INP) as a Core Web Vital metric tomorrow, Tuesday, March 12, 2024. This has nothing to do with the Google March 2024 Core update that is currently rolling out at the same time, but I am confident this will confuse SEOs even more since "core" is in the name of both of these changes.

Mike Fisher reminds us how important it is for leaders to be excellent listeners in Listen or Speak. This part particularly resonated with me because it’s a misconception about me that I’ve had to deal with my entire career:

Just because we speak softly doesn’t mean we act with hesitancy or indecisiveness. We can be a strong leader, setting the example, and making the tough decisions all the while communicating in a manner that keeps the conversation going and open to other people’s...

Alex Heath has a really interesting interview with Figma’s CEO Dylan Field, covering life at Figma after regulators forced Adobe to abandon its $20 billion acquisition of his company. It covers a wide range of topics, but I wanted to highlight Field’s thoughts on generative AI, which largely matches my own viewpoint:

If I was to zoom out even further to knowledge work, we’re very much in a paradigm of AI as a tool and AI helping people get work done, but it’s not necessarily a...

Today is the first day I have seen solid evidence of serious ranking volatility and changes related to the big Google March 2024 Core Update. As a reminder, the Google March 2024 Core Update officially started on March 5, 2024 and will take up to a month to fully roll out, we are expecting numerous ranking changes during the next few weeks.

Derek Thompson, whose writing for The Atlantic I always appreciate, has a really good article on How Happy Couples Argue (gift link).

The key isn’t that happy couples fight over the right things. Happy couples fight in the right way. In bad conversations and bad fights, both people in the relationship were trying to control each other. Rather than try to control their partners, happy couples were more likely to focus on controlling themselves. They sat with silence more. They slowed down...