Industry News

Google's Danny Sullivan said on Friday, "We don't confirm any of the things [page experience or core web vitals] as a direct ranking factor." He added, "But to reiterate we look at many things not one thing and even the one thing might not be a direct ranking factor."

Google might be having some weird bug with XML sitemap files that have hyphens within the final name. So if your sitemap file name is /sitemap-10.xml it will trigger a "couldn't fetch" error, but using /sitemap10.xml with the same exact file will not trigger any errors.

On Friday afternoon, I was able to play a bit with Bing Deep Search, Microsoft's "enhancement" to Bing Search that provides a "deeper and richer exploration of the web." And honestly, my quick impression was that I was not too impressed, mostly because some results were not returned and because it took about a full minute for it to provide results.

As expected, Google has finally released its updated SEO starter guide and it was cut down in a big way. Google said this update was aimed at making it work for someone first getting into SEO and less for an advanced SEO professional.

Microsoft is officially testing a new version of the base model of Copilot (formerly known as Bing Chat), which they code-named Deucalion. Mikhail Parakhin from Microsoft confirmed this over the weekend saying on X, "We are continually improving Microsoft Copilot, testing a new version of the base model in a flight."

A couple of months ago, I documented how some Googlers have been removing some of their old posts (tweets) from X (Twitter). John Mueller from Google didn't really comment on why back then (I asked) but yesterday he finally explained why he keeps removing his old Tweets (Posts) from the platform.

I was recently asked by a colleague to write up our team’s reasoning for using a Now/Next/Later roadmap to plan our work (instead of quarterly/annual roadmaps with dates). If you already use Now/Next/Later nothing in here will be new to you, but I thought I’d share what I wrote for this internal document in case it’s useful to anyone hoping to make this shift as well.

We use an adapted version of a Now/Next/Later roadmap to plan our work. You can read more about this approach in...

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

This week, we covered another Google Search indexing issue, plus this ongoing issue with recipes in the Google Search results. I suspect we will soon have a very big Google Search ranking update - a storm is coming...

Are you ready for the big Google Webmaster report - well, here is the February 2024 edition. This month, Google confirmed an issue with teetering in and out results over the weekend and with that fix, we saw the weekend Google ranking updates calm and slow.