Greetings, everyone. We know that most of you are enjoying a relaxing vacation day. We’re working. International Women’s Day is not a holiday in the United States. We’re in good company though: Laos, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Mongolia, and Uganda do not officially observe IWD either.
The host of Google Search Central’s new How Search Works series definitely got today off. His name is Gary. We can’t identify his accent, but we suspect he’s from the half of Europe that doesn’t get much Travel Channel screen time. Still, the IWD exception list didn’t contain any European countries at all, so he’s probably taking a well-deserved break after recording the heartracing pair of initial installments of what will ultimately become a five-part Search overview.
The first video is a four-minute introduction. The second (and most recent) is an explainer video that goes over the way Google Search crawls websites. The next one will be about indexing. We don’t know what the fourth and fifth videos will focus on yet. It’s a good bet that the remaining videos will get published in the near future.
A new core update started rolling out on Tuesday. This one is unusual because Google is telegraphing its primary objectives. The Search blog published this post about “tackling spammy, low-quality content” within a minute or two of the core update announcement .
The blog post also vaguely broaches the topics of expired domain and site reputation abuse. One of our staff Zoom calls from two weeks ago interestingly featured a sideline discussion about how many defunct California newspaper domains are being propped up as sponsored content vessels (e.g. East Bay Times, Monterey Herald, Times Standard, and Santa Cruz Sentinel) that link to gambling websites. It looks like Google quickly caught on to how much undeserved authority those casinos were leaching from formerly-trustworthy sites, but it was a source of amusement for us while it lasted.
All right, everyone. We still have calls to make today. Let’s get to the links.
The Atlantic published an article called It’s Time to Give Up on Email on Monday (that link will take you to a paywall on mobile devices; this one won’t). We’re not sure what to make of it because the author spends the first four paragraphs complaining about spam before admitting that an email address is a modern society requirement. Maybe one of you can make sense of it. Our second link goes to a Rolling Stone column about Doritos making its way down the same marketing path that resulted in Bud Light losing its status as America’s most-purchased beer. Our third link is a Hootsuite guide to the ranking signals of different social media platforms in 2024. It probably has the most practical information of any of these links. Last: did any of you know about the existence of the WcDonald’s Universe? It’s a thing. Do what you will with this information. We’ve heard the chili sauce is decent.
Take care of yourselves out there. Ladies, again, happy International Women’s Day. We love you.
Have a great weekend.