Industry News

Tim Casasola’s post Create awareness of reality through bottom-up strategy points to an issue that we often see in teams—the work that they are doing is disconnected from the company’s core strategy:

There is often a difference between what an organization says its strategy is and what customer/project teams do on a day-to-day. When this dissonance is present, customer/project teams share with the org that their reality isn’t aligned with the organization’s vision. “It’s great that we...

Google has announced a new big search ranking algorithm update named the helpful content update - yes, Google named it that. This update will start to roll out next week and will target content that is, um, not helpful to humans and people.

Google has announced it will be launching the fifth Product Reviews update in the coming weeks, which would be just a few weeks after Google finished rolling out the last product reviews update, the July 2022 product reviews update, on August 2nd.

And so the line of Postman’s that holds me is his challenge to the critics who spent their time urging television to be better, rather than asking what television was: “The trouble with such people is that they do not take television seriously enough.” I have come to think the same of today’s technologists: Their problem is that they do not take technology seriously enough. They refuse to see how it is changing us or even how it is changing them.

— Ezra Klein, I Didn’t Want It to Be...

Ben Casnocha has a long, excellent piece entitled 10,000 Hours with Reid Hoffman: What I Learned, in which he shares a bunch of lessons he learned from then LinkedIn founder:

A lot of strategists (and CEOs) think that their job is to conceive a strategy and then hand it off to the underlings to execute. They might concede that delegation matters, but usually as a matter of execution more than strategy.

Reid disagrees. He once told me, “Whoever is actually immersed in the...

Google just announced that it fixed a bug with Google Search Console that labeled pages as being indexed when they were not indexed. Google said this bug "affected many properties".

Google has reenabled the validate fix feature in Google Search Console just now. It was not there a couple of hours ago and has been not working since the beginning of this month but now it is back.

Google has launched some improvements to featured snippets, about this result and the content advisories in Google Search. MUM now works with featured snippets to help Google understand the notion of consensus and then highlight words in the featured snippets, known as callouts.

Last night, Google suffered a pretty big outage with Google Search that is still lingering through this morning. It seemed to be larger than just an outage because there are tons of complaints about indexing issues, pages dropping out of the index, and super poor quality and dated search results being shown in Google this morning.

On Saturday, August 6th, we saw a lot of signals that there was another Google Search ranking algorithm update. It is not clear if these are tremors for the finished Google products reviews update from July 2022 or if this is something new and different.