newsletter
Afternoon Coffee Reading
Tech companies want AI search — but is it sustainable? Plus, the rise of WhatsApp audience engagement.
AI
Is AI search a sideshow, or a potential economic apocalypse?
Will AI-infused search be the end of publishing economics as we know it? Or is the hype outrunning the utility?
SEO
Why Google's Core Web Vitals update is going to hit medium-sized publishers hard
Major changes are coming to Google next year - and the technical burden of them are likely to fall disproportionatly on the middle rank of publishers.
SEO
SEO: big changes are coming to nofollow - here's what you need to know
Google is making the first big change to "nofollow" in a decade and a half. Here's what you should know.
SEO
SEOs buying up defunct URLs linked to by major news sites
The black hat SEO business has a new trick - and publishers should be careful of their old links.
MailOnline
MailOnline takes brutal hit from Google algorithm update
A MailOnline SEO has admitted to a big traffic hit from a Google change.
audience development
Google knocks Facebook off the referral traffic top spot
About four years ago, social traffic eclipsed traffic from search, across publishers generally. And by “social traffic”, I largely mean “Facebook”. That era appears to have passed. According to data from Parse.ly, a real-time analytics platform, Google is back on top: Conrad Lee, writing on the Parse.ly blog
AMPs
Google's Top Stories algorithm is failing to detect authoritative sources
This is a pretty significant Google algorithm fail: > Also, apparently Google is putting 4chan threads in their top story unit now? So, the number one hit for his name is a /pol/ thread. pic.twitter.com/OYwW6pbWvy [https://t.co/OYwW6pbWvy] — Ryan Broderick (@broderick) October 2, 2017 [https://twitter.
AMPs
Accelerated Mobile Pages: great for SEO, bad for control
John Gruber [http://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/10/21/google-amp], back in October: > Can someone explain to me why a website would publish AMP versions of their articles? They do load fast, which is a terrific user experience, but as far as I can see, sites that publish AMP
fake news
Fake news is just the tip of the propaganda iceberg
Fake news is Facebook’s problem, right? Well, maybe it’s a touch bigger than that. Maybe Google has the problem, too [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/04/google-democracy-truth-internet-search-facebook] : > Are Jews evil? It’s not a question I’ve ever thought of asking. I hadn’t gone
Google search goes mobile first - desktop database relegated
Google is going to make its forthcoming mobile search index its primary dataset [http://searchengineland.com/google-divide-index-giving-mobile-users-better-fresher-content-261037] : > Google is going to create a separate mobile index within months, one that will be the main or “primary” index that the search engine uses to respond to queries. A separate desktop
Google kills the PageRank toolbar
Public disclosure of PageRank is done [http://searchengineland.com/google-has-confirmed-they-are-removing-toolbar-pagerank-244230] > Google has confirmed with Search Engine Land that it is removing Toolbar PageRank. That means that if you are using a tool or a browser that shows you PageRank data from Google, within the next couple weeks it will