Industry News

Catch up on interesting new discussion and industry news.

    Google March 28th Algorithm Ranking Update?

    rustybrick
    by rustybrick
    Mar 29, 2018
    There may have been another update late March 27th, mostly on March 28th and through today, with the Google search rankings. I am seeing an uptick in chatter from the SEO community...

    Easier blog post image management with Dropshare and Amazon S3

    by Rian van der Merwe
    Mar 28, 2018
    I’m always on the lookout for faster ways to upload and insert images into blog posts. It’s the part of the blogging workflow that I dislike the most. Up to now I’ve used a pretty convoluted combination of Amazon S3 buckets and Transmit. But over the weekend, while moving hosting providers1, I finally came up with a really simple image upload workflow that I thought I’d share in case it helps anyone else.

    This workflow lets you drag and drop an image to a menu bar icon on your Mac, and...

    Google's Mobile First Indexing Is Unrelated To Weekend Algorithm Update

    rustybrick
    by rustybrick
    Mar 28, 2018
    Yesterday during the video hangout with Google's John Mueller I asked if the mobile first indexing rollout was at all related to what folks were seeing with this past weekend's Google algorithm update. In short, John said no, they are unrelated...

    Product management for maturing products

    by Rian van der Merwe
    Mar 27, 2018
    Janna Bastow wrote a great post on product management for maturing products. From Growing up Lean: Lean Strategies for Maturing Products, here’s a recommendation for how to avoid becoming a “Feature Factory”:

    Break the backlog up into two parts: The Product Backlog and the Development Backlog. […]

    Product Backlog: A list of all of the things you could do. You’ll never complete everything on this list, and it’ll always be in a constant state of flux. It’ll include customer...

    Google Begins Rolling Out Mobile-First Indexing; Few Notice

    rustybrick
    by rustybrick
    Mar 27, 2018
    Google announced yesterday that they are now rolling out mobile-first indexing to sites that follow the best practices for mobile-first indexing.

    Craig Mod on the revival of print and why it’s important to go offline

    by Rian van der Merwe
    Mar 26, 2018
    Oh boy, where to begin with Craig Mod’s interview with Offscreen Magazine. I’ve been following Craig’s work for a long time, so I have an undeniable bias towards everything he does. But some of the things he says in this interview touched a deep nerve for me, as it relates to a lot of what I’ve been thinking about lately.

    It’s a long interview, and you should absolutely take the time to read it all. I’ll just post a couple of my favorite quotes here.

    On the revival of print and...

    Google Algorithm Update March 23rd : Chatter & Signals

    rustybrick
    by rustybrick
    Mar 26, 2018
    As I mentioned in my Friday video, there seemed to be some chatter around the algorithm update starting back up again after a number of days of calm. Well, the weekend got pretty heated with chatter within the community...

    Contrarian Take: Don’t Start Your Content Marketing with “What Do My Customers Want?”

    randfish
    by randfish
    Mar 25, 2018
    If you’re in the business of content marketing, I know you’ve seen advice like this: “Start with your customer personas.” “Create content that will resonate with your customers.” “Great content is content that your customers actually want to consume.” It sounds compelling. But in my experience, it’s wrong. Or at least, incomplete. Why? #1) Because, most content marketing goals are…

    The post Contrarian Take: Don’t Start Your Content Marketing with “What Do My Customers Want?” appeared...

    Social media and ambient humanity

    by Rian van der Merwe
    Mar 24, 2018
    I can’t get this quote from Dan Cohen’s Back to the Blog out of my head:

    It is psychological gravity, not technical inertia, however, that is the greater force against the open web. Human beings are social animals and centralized social media like Twitter and Facebook provide a powerful sense of ambient humanity—the feeling that “others are here”—that is often missing when one writes on one’s own site. Facebook has a whole team of Ph.D.s in social psychology finding ways to increase...

    Is Google Flight Search Spamming Google's Search Results?

    rustybrick
    by rustybrick
    Mar 23, 2018
    Martin MacDonald notified me on Twitter of Google Flights spamming Google with links in their footers and potentially even hiding links to users but not GoogleBot...