Industry News

I absolutely love when the industry is transparent and Dan Petrovic from Dejan SEO said his site was slapped by an unnatural links manual action by Google and the result was that his site no longer ranks for its name or key terms. A lot of folks in the industry have been saying Google has toned down these manual actions, espesially around links but here is one example of one.

Back in 2015, on mobile, Google went from showing the URL to showing the site name, plus the breadcrumb in the search results. This morning, I have been hit up numerous times about Google doing the same on desktop. It doesn't seem 100% rolled out yet, so this might be a test or a bug, but it seems Google is showing breadcrumbs, not URLs, on desktop as well now.

Kate Clayton wrote an excellent essay on simplicity in design that goes way beyond the usual platitudes. From Be an Elegant Simplifier:

When I saw Danny Kahneman speak at a meeting last year, he shared a similar principle to the Crystal Goblet he took from psychologist Kurt Lewin, who, like Beatrice Warde, was active in the 1930s. Imagine, Lewin said, you have an object with forces pushing against it from opposite sides. Human nature would say if you want it to move one way, add more...

I love this sentiment from Rich Ziade in the post The New MVP: The Minimum Valuable Product. He talks about what happens when customers become a coalition that shares your mission. This is written from an agency perspective, but it applies just as much to product companies:

There is no more powerful political tool than releasing good software into people’s hands. You’ll find that the burden of consensus-building and campaigning is far lighter because the thing speaks for itself. It’s...

Last year, I wrote a post called Quality Scores for Queries: Structured Data, Synthetic Queries and Augmentation Queries, which told us that Google may look at query logs and structured data (table data and schema data) related to a site to...

Last night I reported that Google was having issues indexing new content again, yes - again. Danny Sullivan from Google said it seems like that was the case and said "We'll post on @googlewmc if we confirm and have more to share." Nothing was posted there - yet. But it does seem like indexing issues are happening for some sites - not all.

Page Laubheimer explains that The 3-Click Rule for Navigation Is False:

The 3-click rule is a persistent, unofficial heuristic that says that no page should take more than 3 clicks (or taps on a touchscreen) to access. A variation pronounces that the most important information should take no more than 3 clicks to get to. […]

The big problem with the 3-click rule is that it has not been supported by data in any published studies to date. In fact, a study by Joshua Porter has...

Over the weekend, maybe started late Friday, August 16th, more noticeable on Saturday, August 17th, there may have been a rollout of another Google search ranking algorithm. It is 100% not as big as the past ones we have been covering recently but there is some chatter and some of the tools showed spikes in fluctuations this weekend.

I enjoyed this interview with Todd Curtis, Chief Product Officer at You Need a Budget. They cover a lot of ground in From spreadsheet to digital product: You Need a Budget’s Product Excellence evolution, but I especially like the discussion about the many different customer touchpoints they maintain:

As ideas move into discovery and validation, Todd and his team go to customers directly. Todd tries to have hour-long sessions with two customers every week to learn about their budgeting...