Industry News

Google posted this morning that they are going to stop unofficially supporting the noindex, nofollow and crawl-delay directives within robots.txt files. Google has been saying this for years actually and hinted this was coming really soon and now it is here.

Ulaize Hernandez Troyas makes a good argument for involving full teams in the prioritization of what to work on:

This type of ongoing communication throughout the prioritization process has a definite cost, but the number of benefits from this approach is worth it. We have reduced friction between teammates, which has saved us from long-winded conversations that stemmed from misunderstandings. The sense of ownership and purpose has increased the team’s motivation. On a more personal...

Google's John Mueller addressed the topic of sites leasing or renting out subdomains off of their main domain and letting third-parties put their content on those subdomains in an effort to rank better in Google and sell more. John didn't call it spam but did say the search leads at Google are aware of this and have been in discussions about how to handle such efforts.

I really like Matthew Ström’s concept of Responsive Roadmaps that “visualize the process of turning uncertainty and complexity into outcomes and output.” He presents this as an antidote to all the things that are wrong with traditional roadmaps:

Traditional project roadmaps are right about our knowledge in a moment of time. They are good records of our beliefs about the correct sequence and magnitude of our work. But these roadmaps are wrong about the reality of work, and almost every...

I really like Jeff Gothelf’s approach to the question “Does every project need to be Agile?” in his newsletter issue Digital transformation is not innovation:

No. Every project does not have to be Agile. However, each project you work on should encourage and support agility. This means that every initiative creates the ability, desire and safety to change course in the face of evidence that contradicts our original plan.

He goes deeper on what it means for teams to have the...

I am seeing chatter within the SEO community throughout the past 24 hours and many of the automated Google tracking tools seem to be corroborating with that chatter that there may have been a Google update yesterday. Now, Google has not confirmed this update - so it is likely not a core update but might be something else going on.

Google has added mobile-first indexing information including if you are on mobile-first indexing, if so, when you switched over and so on, to the toolsets and reporting within Google Search Console. This was announced on Twitter and aims at helping webmasters "understand how Google is crawling your website," Google said.

About a month ago, Google dropped the green ad label and switched it to a black ad label. The SEM community was not a fan, they felt it blended too much with the organic ads espesially since Google also rolled out favicons in the organic search results. Well, Google may be testing bringing back the green ad label now.

Google has said that the featured snippet without an attribution was a bug and 100% not something Google is testing. Danny Sullivan from Google was pretty upset with me for calling this a test when I never asked Google if they were indeed testing it.