Industry News

Probably the biggest news for the SEO industry out of Google I/O yesterday was that Google said Googlebot is now evergreen, meaning it will stay up-to-date with the latest version of Chromium, their popular Chrome browser. This brings thousands of new features to Googlebot for crawling purposes.

The past month in terms of Google search, SEO and webmaster related topics can be summed up into two primary categories. First is the massive number of bugs and the second is about new features and tools...

I like the reframing Sherif Mansour does in his talk Popular Misconceptions of the Product Craft. For example, here is his response to the common misconception that marketing-driven development is always bad:

As product managers we should always educate our teams on the value of great marketing, embrace the art of storytelling that infuses our marketing teams, and think about how we can bring that back to our teams. Whether you follow Amazon’s press release method, mock-up landing...

Remember those Google Search Console bugs that we thought was related to the indexing issue? Google said it was resolved mostly with the exception of the backlink report, which should be resolved soon. Well, resolved means that the data was completely lost for all reports excluding the performance report and filled with data from April 26th instead.

Just when you thought the bugs were over, we have a new batch of them within Google Search Console. This one is specific to the manual actions viewer. Google's John Mueller confirmed this morning after numerous reports starting yesterday afternoon that there is something wrong with the manual action viewer.

I really like the NOBL team’s focus on Culture/Market fit in their article The Only Thing More Important Than Product/Market Fit:

Find yourself a healthy market, yes. Then develop a culture that can deliver product/market fit. Your culture is what produces your products and services. You know you have culture/market fit when both talent and customers flock to your company for who you are, even above what you make. You know you have product/market fit when legions of customers buy your...

Ian Bicking makes some very good points in his post “Users want control” is a shoulder shrug:

Control is what you need when you want something and it won’t happen on its own. But (usually) it’s not control you want, it’s just a means. So when we say users want control over X — their privacy, their security, their data, their history — we are first acknowledging that current systems act against users, but we aren’t proposing any real solution. We’re avoiding even talking about the...

There are some decent day-to-day work tips in Sierra Newell’s 7 Project Management Principles Product Managers Can Learn From. There’s one principle I wanted to expand on, and that’s “Define the scope and stick to it”. First, from the post:

Product managers should set the scope of their products’ development as early in the process as possible. Learning how to say no to product requests is a valuable skill. But it is also a reactive method of keeping your product’s development on...

I am seeing both chatter and tracking tools reporting a possible Google search ranking algorithm update that touched down over the weekend, around April 26th. There is chatter the online forums and the tracking tools are mostly showing changes here as well.

After Google pausing several of their reports within the Google Search Console due to the indexing bugs, Google now has updated them as of this morning. Previously it was stuck at data from April 7th or so, now you can see data as recent as a couple days ago, April 27th.