Industry News

On August 22nd, Google released the August 2023 core update. We did not feel much of any volatility until a few days later, on August 25th. Then we had some movement on that Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and then it died down for a couple of days, picking up again a few days ago.

I didn’t realize that there’s a strategy backlash going on in some corners of the internet, but Packy McCormick has a good defense of the importance of having a good strategy:

Execution without strategy is wasteful and tragic. Just as “Companies that have the best products, most talented people, and fastest growth are precisely the ones for which moats are most important,” companies that are the best at execution are precisely the ones for which strategy is most important. They’re the...

After testing three different formats for links within the Google Search Generative Experience and then pausing that test a few weeks later, Google has officially decided to go with the arrow-down buttons that reveal links to web pages as cards.

I’m on a bit of a break right now (LinkedIn update here if you’re interested), and while I’m figuring out how to spend my time wisely I’ve been reading a lot of sci-fi. The latest book I finished—and really enjoyed—is Ascension by Nicholas Binge:

An enormous snow-covered mountain has appeared in the Pacific Ocean. No one knows when exactly it showed up, precisely how big it might be, or how to explain its existence. When Harold Tunmore is contacted by a shadowy organization to help...

As you know, Google released its first core update in over five months, the Google August 2023 core update, on August 22nd at around 1:30 pm ET. Since then, I've been tracking the volatility and the chatter from within the SEO community to see how widespread, extensive, and impactful this update has been.

Google Search has started to roll out the second broad core update of the 2023 year, and this one is named the August 2023 broad core update. It started on August 22, 2023, at about 1:30 pm ET and as you know, can take about two weeks to roll out.

I fully agree with Chris Coyier’s main point in Other People’s Busted Software is an Opportunity:

If you make software that does work reliably, you’ve got a leg up. Even if your customers don’t tell you “I like your software because it always works”, they’ll feel it and make choices around knowing it.

It feels like so many teams prioritize “innovation” over quality, so we end up getting stuck with products that have an overwhelming number of features but they all barely work—or the...

Since I prefer reading over watching, I appreciate Dave Rupert’s summary of this video about AI/LLM responsibility in his post Uncovering a new class of responsibilities:

Three rules of technology outline their nearly hour long talk: When you invent a new technology, you uncover a new class of responsibilities If that tech confers power, it starts a race If you do not coordinate, the race ends in tragedy

It’s those last steps that are the concerning ones. If we fail to respond to...

Here’s a good reminder that Incidents can’t be prevented, but learned from:

But approaching incidents with a mindset of learning makes it an exciting rather than painful situation. Because you’ll know you’ll never run out of sources for learning. And once you’ve realised what a good source for learning incidents are, it’s maybe even time to take a good look whether shallow incident data like “mean time to detection” and “mean time to resolution” (or the maybe worst offender of all “mean...

I like Tracy Durnell’s Reading Philosophy in 17 Guidelines, especially this one:

Treat my To Be Read list as a stream to dip into, not a to-do list. I know I won’t get to all the books on my TBR.

It reminds me of an article from 2011 that I come back to often—The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We’re All Going To Miss Almost Everything:

Now, everything gets dropped into our laps, and there are really only two responses if you want to feel like you’re well-read, or well-versed in music,...