As you all know, I source a lot of forums and Twitter threads here for the stories that I write. Without the amazing individuals that make up the search industry, this site would not exist. In fact, when I started this site over 18 years ago, its purpose was to cover what the community is buzzing about and this site remains true to that today.

The week between Christmas and New Years is general slow and it was but we did have some Google search ranking jolts and tremors this week…

Fiddling With First-Party: B2B Firms Face Corporate And Data Integration Hurdles 41 percent of B2B brands have said they use first-party data for marketing segmentation, while 37 percent use it for sales outreach, and 36 percent for advertising and analytics — one of several findings of interest to B2B marketers contained in recently-released Dun & Bradstreet study data. MediaPost Oracle to Buy Cerner in $28B Health Care Play Oracle has announced that it will acquire medical records firm Cerner for some $28.3 billion, a move that will bring a vast expansion to Oracle’s health care segment and bolster the reach of both firms, following a similar move by Microsoft earlier this year, Oracle recently announced. CFO B2B Tech Sector Will Decline In 2022, But Rebound In 2023: Study The B2B technology category is forecast to see a two percent decrease in 2022 in the U.S., while accompanied by a three percent increase in overall sales placing the annual figure at some $106 billion, according to newly-released report data from the NPD Group.

Google Ads is rolling out or now has the Google Creative Studio’s asset library feature directly in Google Ads. I believe Brett Bodofsky was one of the first to share this on Twitter and George Nguyen confirmed it with Google a couple weeks ago.

Google’s John Mueller confirmed what it has I believe said before, that there is not difference in terms of SEO value between the three link attributes. Google supports nofollow and also UGC and sponsored link attributes

If you do a search in Google Search for [new years] related keywords, Google will bring back the confetti easter egg from last year. Google by default will throw down some confetti and then let you also add more confetti to the mix by clicking on the confetti popper.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today…

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter when it comes to really long HTML file sizes, Google can handle it – and you should not worry about it. The question came up when someone shared a screenshot of Bing Webmaster Tools giving a notice that the “HTML size is too long.”

How is this for an unpaid endorsement of your SEO product – John Mueller of Google said that he pays for a license to Screaming Frog.