Industry News

I have to say that this week, starting from last Friday, has been pretty volatile with the organic search results. All week long, people have been asking me if there is a Google update today. Truth is, it feels like tremors all week long. The chatter and tracking tools seem to confirm this as well.

Google announced last night that it will soon enforce new limitations on what you can use Google Ads for with political ads. Specifically Google said the targeting options have been limited to "age, gender, and general location."

It has been one rocky month with both Google organic search ranking updates and local search ranking updates. This weekend there is chatter and signals of yet another Google search ranking algorithm update this weekend. The chatter started Friday and has continued through the weekend and even the tools are showing fluctuations.

Remember the Google local update we reported about earlier this month, well the local SEO folks are still tracking this update in detail. Joy Hawkins named it the Bedlam update because it is "a scene of uproar and confusion" and she hates the animal names (sorry, had to use a roaring lion image). But she also posted an update saying she things this is about "relevance, not proximity."

Google makes it easy for marketers to make bad decisions by hiding the performance of image search traffic.

Marketers have grown accustomed to not seeing image search traffic broken out in analytics packages. And Google persists in telling marketers to use Google Search Console to track image search traffic.

The problem? Google Search Console doesn’t tell marketers how image search traffic performs.

Here’s why Google’s decision to hide image search traffic performance is hurting...

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I appreciated this counter-cultural viewpoint from the folks at Feature Upvote, on avoiding the need to “grow at any cost”:

For us, we realised success means running a growing company (profitable with customers in 30+ countries) that we enjoy working for but doesn’t dominate our lives. We want to have time for...

As you know, we saw a huge amount of chatter around a big Google search ranking algorithm update starting November 7th and 8th through the weekend. There were mixed signals in that the chatter in the industry was very heavy but (a) Google did not pre-announce it and (b) the automated tracking tools didn't really pick up on the update.

Friday morning, November 8th, I saw a sprinkle of chatter across the industry about a Google search algorithm update. Some were claiming massive changes in traffic and rankings. But to be honest, the chatter was incredibly limited, that is until several hours later and now the chatter throughout the weekend is off the charts.