Link Building Strategies

Google announced on Friday that there is a delay with the Google Ads team reviewing and thus approving developer token access applications. This is because Google is "seeing significant interest in the developer community for Google Ads API access, and are receiving an increase in developer token access applications," the company said.View the full article

The Google preferred sources deeplink button feature is broken and has been since at least last Wednesday. When you click on a button to make a site a preferred source, such as for this site, it does not pre-fill in the site's URL in the box, as it should. You can retype it in the box but it does not pre-fill it for you.View the full article

Over the past week or so, Google has been testing a new format for link cards in the AI Overviews within Google Search. When you place your mouse cursor over a link clip icon, a new overlay will show you the page/site cards that line of text is being sourced from.View the full article

A thread at Reddit asked if a one-year-old website can beat a four-year-old website in SEO and perform better in Google Search. John Mueller from Google answered with his classic "it depends."View the full article

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

Microsoft Bing is testing a dynamically loading results count under the search box. So when you enter your search phrase, the results count will dynamically count up from 0 to the number of results found.View the full article

Google announced a new ad unit for AI Mode for shopping ads which promotes retailers. Google also launched Veo 3 support in Google Ads Asset Studio. Plus Vidhya Srinivasan, VP/GM of Ads & Commerce at Google, published her annual letter to the industry on the Google blog.View the full article

On February 10th, we reported the beginning of yet another unconfirmed Google Search ranking update. The volatility has not cooled yet and it seems it may have even heated up through the weekend.View the full article

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

This week in search we have more ongoing Google search ranking volatility. Bing Webmaster Tools rolled out new AI Performance reports with a new design. Google AI Overviews tests new overlay cards. Grokipedia is seeing a decline in visibility in Google Search and ChatGPT...View the full article

Last November and December, Google announced a slew of new features for Google Search Console. But it seems like most of us still do not have access to those features.View the full article

Google Ads added to the Products section of your ads account the ability to see product eligibility directly in the Status column. This lets you see very quickly where each product is eligible across different campaigns in your Google Ads account.View the full article

Google's John Mueller said he still recommends you have visible anchor text for your links in order to "provide more context for search engines." Don't just use title elements in the link attribute; make sure the link has actual visible anchor text.View the full article

Google Ads now has a new recommended experiments box in the Experiments page. This should offer you customized and personalized recommendations that Google Ads thinks you should try based on your account setup and performance data.View the full article

Microsoft is testing underlining the product name and product price in the shopping ads carousel at the top of the Bing Search results. I am not sure how much this adds to the interface but maybe it drives a bit more attention and thus clicks?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 Ads launched new AI Mode retailer ads...View the full article

Asad Awan, who is in charge of monetization at OpenAI was interviewed by his own company on "The Thinking Behind Ads in ChatGPT." It is a 25 minute interview and one part he discusses how he would like to see advertisers simply prompt to create ads and ad campaigns and not have to hire an agency or "performance marketers" to run ads on ChatGPT.View the full article

Google is rolling out UCP, Universal Commerce Protocol, powered checkout in AI Mode. This launched as part of the Google Ads news from yesterday, and you can now see it in AI Mode for products from Etsy and Wayfair.View the full article

Google AdSense has added additional triggers for vignette ads. There are now a total of six triggers, three old ones and three new ones. These new triggers took effect on February 9, 2026.View the full article

A month ago, we reported on a new help document on Google Ads for Performance Max optimization experiments: A/B testing assets beta. Well, now some are seeing this in the wild, where you can set up these A/B tests in a controlled environment. View the full article

Google will stop showing the business short names on Google Business Profiles in Search and Google Maps. The short name will still work, if you have one, but going forward, the link in your Google Business Profile will no longer be displayed to you or searchers.View the full article

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

I am seeing some early signs of yet another unconfirmed Google Search ranking update with more volatility touching down today, February 10th. The chatter within the SEO community is starting to spike, and some of the third-party tracking tools are showing volatility.View the full article

Google added a new button to the top stories section of Google Search named "Sign in to customize." This leads users who are not logged into Google to sign in, so those users can configfure there preferred sources in Google Search.View the full article

There are some reports coming out that Grokipedia, the AI-based Wikipedia, is now showing a decline in search visibility in both Google and even ChatGPT. This comes after both an indexing and ranking surge in Google Search.View the full article