Link Building Strategies

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web. Google confirmed ads with AI Overviews make as much as ads without AI Overviews on the page...View the full article

Microsoft is testing putting a shopping bag icon on its "Shop Now" Bing Ads layout. I cannot replicate this but normally Bing shows a button that says "Shop Now" and that is it, but in this test, Bing is adding a bag icon before the "Shop Now" text.View the full article

Google is rolling out device targeting controls and features within Google Ads Performance Max campaigns. We knew this was coming and now it seems to be rolling out to some (not all) advertisers. This allows you to target based on device type, such as computers, mobile phones, tablets and/or TV screens.View the full article

Google Ads announced they will "now allow relevant Search ads from advertisers who showed amongst top ads to also participate in the bottom ads auction." Honestly, I thought this update happened last month when they started to allow double serving ads (well, Google now says it is not double serving, so maybe that is the announcement here...).View the full article

Google Ads search themes for Performance Max campaign has a limit of 25 search themes per asset group. Well, according to Thomas Eccel, Google is testing doubling that limit to 50 search themes per asset group.View the full article

Google Search may be pushing out another search ranking update of sorts, I am seeing more signs of tremors and volatility over the past 24-hours. Some of the tools are already picking up on it but the SEO community is noticing some big movement starting on Monday, May 12th and into today, Tuesday, May 13th.View the full article

Ryan Moulton, a Google Search engineer who worked on Google's search rankings algorithms for over 18 years now, went to X to call out some of what the courts are saying as not true. He went on to say, "This is now the second time I've seen my work cited prominently in a major lawsuit against Google, and I have to say, it has not given me a lot of faith in the court process around issues like this."View the full article

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...View the full article

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web. Google confirmed there is a bug with the referrer links in AI Mode...View the full article

Last month we shared the spam efforts the Google Maps team announced - but did you know that in 2024 Google had almost one billion reviews published within Google Maps? That is 999 million reviews, 752 million photos and videos and 94 million place edits published just in 2024.View the full article

Google is now testing summarizing the stories listed on Google Discover with generative AI. Some are calling this adding AI Overviews to Google Discover, which I guess is about the same thing. Of course, publishers may be worried that these AI summaries will reduce clicks from Google Discover.View the full article

The details from the DOJ and Google monopoly case hearing exhibits just keep on flowing and with that, we have another mention of how Google does look at clicks from the search results. This one talks about how the position of the link can be a bias towards the number of clicks that result gets, so Google had to develop an adjustment of sorts to counter that bias.View the full article

Earlier this month, Google updated its Ads Transparency policy to specify that it will display the payment profile name as the payer name for verified advertisers. Well, now we are starting to see a new section that says "Ads funded by" on the "My Ad Center" section of the search ads.View the full article

Yep, we are seeing more Google search ranking volatility mid-week. I posted the monthly Google webmaster report for February. Google Ads has a new quality update that accounts for user navigation experience...View the full article

Google has updated its Google iOS app and with that, the most noticeable change was it updated the super G logo, with a more blended version of the logo. I am not sure if this is going to be the new logo going forward of this is a temporary change for an event, maybe like I/O.View the full article

Google released AI Mode in the U.S. a couple of days ago and Tom Critchlow and Patrick Stox noticed that Google prevented you from tracking referrer data from AI Mode. Well, that turned out to be unintentional and Google said it is a bug and it will be fixed.View the full article

Another Google court document from the DOJ trial showed that Google said it is currently rethinking its entire search stack, from the ground up, with LLMs playing a more fundamental role. The doc said:View the full article

In early March, it was leaked that Google Ads will be rolling out channel reporting for Performance Max campaigns. Well, now it is official, Google said they are introducing "'­new'¬'­ channel-level'¬'­ reporting'¬'­ in'¬'­ Performance'¬'­ Max" plus, "full'¬'­ search'¬'­ terms'¬'­ reporting'¬ and'¬'­ more'¬'­ detailed'¬'­ asset'¬'­ reporting'¬'­ that'¬'­ show'¬'­ you'¬'­ all'¬'­ the'¬'­ metrics'¬'­ for'¬'­ individual'¬'­ assets.'¬"View the full article

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...View the full article

As I mentioned in my Friday video, there seems to be a lot of Google search ranking volatility that kicked off on Friday, May 16th and throughout this weekend. The most heated day seems to have been on Friday but the chatter is pretty busy over the weekend within the SEO community.View the full article

Google is also testing a new pagination bar with page numbers and previous and next icons, instead of the "more search results" button. Bing was recently just testing this too and now I see Google testing it.View the full article

Google is showing the number of followers for a Facebook profile in the Google Ads, the search ads. We saw Google testing this for organic / free results two years ago, but now we see them being tested on sponsored search listings.View the full article

Google has a weird and somewhat limited and rare issue with sitemap files within Google Search Console. These sitemap files cannot be fetched and retrieved by Google Search. The issue seems to be related to 5-character subdomains that are on a Polish ccTLD, .pl.View the full article

Robby Stein, VP of Product at Google Search, confirmed Google is working on making it easier to share AI Overviews within Google Search and AI Mode responses.View the full article

Google Search now lets you see the pricing history and pricing details, including more store details of a specific product, directly from the search results. When you click on the three dots in the product secondary overlay, you get this third-level overlay with those details.View the full article