Industry News

Google's John Mueller said a few minutes ago on YouTube Live around 5 minutes into the video that the weekend update rumors are not Penguin related. So he said you can "rule out" Penguin in terms of saying the Penguin algorithm was updated this weekend...

James Gill has a good overview of How bad features are born:

Most importantly, does this feature deserve to exist? Why are you working on it?

If you’re embarking on a new feature primarily because you’ve seen a competitor release something similar, then you probably haven’t thoroughly considered or even identified the problem you’re trying to solve. If you’re jumping into a new feature because it seems like “it wouldn’t be too hard to do” that’s great, but does it actually...

Joe Tullio has some good tips for remote teams in Distributed UX teams: Early lessons learned. This part, in particular, is something I think many teams ignore because it can feel like busywork:

At Google, we have an internal “snippets” tool for posting regular updates on our work, typically at a weekly cadence. Snippets serve to share the latest mock versions, research reports, study plans, hiring updates, and anything else that feels noteworthy.

To be fair, snippets are a...

It has been almost a month since we reported Google ranking changes, which is rare and it looks like many folks are seeing changes in the core web search results as of early this morning. This is unrelated to the major local ranking changes I reported this morning...

Looks like we got a big update going on, this one in the Google local pack results. The local SEO community is going pretty hot...

Des Traynor shines a light on the unglamorous side of the PM role in Q&A: What does a product manager do?

If you look at how actual product managers work in any company there’s a lot more nitty gritty work. There’s a lot of spreadsheets, wireframes. Google Docs, emails, and oh-so-many Slack channels. And they all exist to research, collaborate, dictate, and document consensus on a direction the product is going. But I think if the role was titled “Direction and Consensus Manager” you...

Tom Dart wrote a really interesting piece on how we change our accents when we talk to machines. From Y’all have a Texas accent? Siri (and the world) might be slowly killing it:

“Most people have what we would call a telephone voice, so they actually change away from their local family accent when they’re speaking on the telephone to somebody they don’t know,” said Alan Black, a Scottish computer scientist who is a professor at the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon...

Aaron Bradley spotted and posted on Google+ that Google has opened up a pilot for the search live coverage carousel...

As you expected, Google was going to drop the mobile friendly label. Well, as of this morning, the mobile friendly label is officially gone.

Here is a screen shot showing the before and after...