Industry News

I am seeing signs both in terms of early chatter within the SEO community and industry and the automated tracking tools of an update brewing. The update may have started some time last night, but let's say this is currently an unconfirmed August 1st update. Google has not pre-announced any core update but who knows.

Yesterday, Google announced that in the coming weeks broad match modifier and phrase match keywords will also begin matching to words within the search query that share the same meaning as the keyword. The SEM/PPC community is not surprised but still very frustrated by this news.

I’m getting increasingly nervous about the ongoing emphasis on getting users “hooked”, which is taking the product world by storm. The latest example (of many) I’ve read over the past few months is Sticky From the Start: How to Create a Sticky Product Experience, which includes advice such as “Create habits to keep them hooked”:

But thanks to notifications, emails, and other prompts, SaaS products have the option to nudge new users to engage in the behaviors most likely to deliver...

Bing is going to be updating the Bing Webmaster Guidelines and as part of that process, Frédéric Dubut from the Bing spam team asked what "shady tactics you think are not penalized enough?" In general, he is taking feedback on the current document before he begins.

Brad Frost argues that design tools are holding us back because “they require a specific toolchain in order to function”. Instead, what we need is closer collaboration:

Tooling can help, sure, but it’s not a silver bullet. To truly address the realities of the medium for which you’re designing, designers and developers should collaborate as equals to solve problems together. That means more talking and real-time collaboration and less time spent throwing static artifacts and Zeplin...

I’m not usually a fan of posts like this, but I just couldn’t resist clicking on Pink Floyd Were Masters At Achieving Product-Market Fit. The first of seven “lessons” is the one that stands out for me:

Obtain Customer Feedback Before You Release Your Product

Musicians spend their entire youth writing songs and performing them in front of live audiences, which ensures that their initial album is validated by their fans before they enter the recording studio....

If you try to access the Google Quality Raters Guidelines PDF document, you will be out of luck. The PDF seems to have been removed from Google's servers. This happened before and when that happened it was a mistake, Google fixed it. This time, I suspect it is almost a mistake and Google will fix it.

In 8 essential metrics for measuring product-led growth Katryna Balboni discusses a few important metrics for measuring and monitoring product-led growth (i.e., turning users into advocates so that they can they drive more acquisition and growth). Time to Value is one that seems particularly useful:

Time to value (TTV) is the amount of time it takes new users to realize your product’s value. Your goal should be to reduce time to value as much as possible-the sooner users reach their...

Google's John Mueller talked about YMYL, specific to the health space, and mentioned that it is if you are writing about a topic on health that you are not an expert on then you are starting off already on a "shaky foundation."

What a wild several days with Google updates - we had fluctuations on July 11, 12 and 16th and then some massive chatter and Google search result fluctuations on July 18th or so. Google would not confirm or deny these updates, so it was named by the community the Google Maverick Update.