Industry News

Links are still an important part of ranking well in search. While I believe engagement signals are what ultimately get you to the top of a search result, links are usually necessary to get on the first page.

In the rush to measure everything, I find many are inadvertently limiting their opportunities. They fail to grasp the invisible attribution model of link acquisition, which is both asymmetrical and asynchronous.

The result? Short-term investments in content that are quickly deemed...

There are signs of a Google search ranking update touching down late August 28th through August 29th. There is both forum chatter within the SEO industry and the rank checking tools also. It is hard to say if this is a big update at this point, it started off pretty mellow but I will watch the chatter and keep you all posted.

Google issued a warning about sites that lease out its own subdomains and subfolders so that other companies can rank their content better on leased domains. Well, now it seems Google is taking action by penalizing those sections of sites that have these leased out sections.

In the hangout with John Mueller and Martin Splitt of Google, Martin Splitt said "the two waves of indexing play less and less of a role." He added, "I wouldn't say that two waves of indexing are dead, it's definitely not. I expect eventually rendering crawling and indexing will come closer together."

This isn't exactly new, news - I covered this in 2014, but with the news around Dejan getting hit badly by a manual action, his plan is to move to a new domain and not redirect the old domain to the new. But John Mueller from Google rained on his parade, if you can call it a parade, by saying Google will find you.

I absolutely love when the industry is transparent and Dan Petrovic from Dejan SEO said his site was slapped by an unnatural links manual action by Google and the result was that his site no longer ranks for its name or key terms. A lot of folks in the industry have been saying Google has toned down these manual actions, espesially around links but here is one example of one.

Back in 2015, on mobile, Google went from showing the URL to showing the site name, plus the breadcrumb in the search results. This morning, I have been hit up numerous times about Google doing the same on desktop. It doesn't seem 100% rolled out yet, so this might be a test or a bug, but it seems Google is showing breadcrumbs, not URLs, on desktop as well now.

Kate Clayton wrote an excellent essay on simplicity in design that goes way beyond the usual platitudes. From Be an Elegant Simplifier:

When I saw Danny Kahneman speak at a meeting last year, he shared a similar principle to the Crystal Goblet he took from psychologist Kurt Lewin, who, like Beatrice Warde, was active in the 1930s. Imagine, Lewin said, you have an object with forces pushing against it from opposite sides. Human nature would say if you want it to move one way, add more...

I love this sentiment from Rich Ziade in the post The New MVP: The Minimum Valuable Product. He talks about what happens when customers become a coalition that shares your mission. This is written from an agency perspective, but it applies just as much to product companies:

There is no more powerful political tool than releasing good software into people’s hands. You’ll find that the burden of consensus-building and campaigning is far lighter because the thing speaks for itself. It’s...