Link Building Strategies

Google announced that Gemini can now respond to your local questions with local results in a "rich, visual format." Google will visually lay out the local results to include photos, ratings, and real-world info from Google Maps data.View the full article

Google Search is testing a feature to quiz you on the product you are looking for and then to give you more tailored recommendations for product suggestions. This box is titled "get tailored recommendations" and it reminds me of the AI powered recommendation ads, but these are different.View the full article

Google made a really small change to its spam policies documentation to say, "In the context of Google Search, spam refers to techniques used to deceive users or manipulate our Search systems into ranking content highly."View the full article

Have you heard of the Google Goldmine Scoring System? It supposedly looks at your page, your content, and Google gives it a goldminePageScore, title tag factor, body factor, anchor factor, heading factor and more.View the full article

Another update in the revised Google Quality Raters Guidelines that was updated on January 23rd was that they added a section for recipe sites and said that requiring "significant scrolling" or making it hard to find the jump to recipe button is not a good thing.View the full article

Google held another Google Creator Summit where they invited 7 creators on a fully paid expense trip to their Washington, D.C. office to spend the first two days in some larger Small Business Summit and then day three with Danny Sullivan, Paul Haahr and I believe HJ Kim from the Google Search team.View the full article

Google has published a new help document titled About the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) and UCP-powered checkout feature on Google. This was published in the Google Merchant Center help documentation section.View the full article

Imagine you own a restaurant and you get all your reservations online through your booking system; you even tell people to book online when they call, via an automated message. But then, all of a sudden, Google decides to hijack that booking link and replace it with Google Assistant's calling feature.View the full article

Google posted a new job listing looking to hire a new Senior Software Engineer, Search, AI Answers Quality. The job post says "Help the AI Answers Quality team deliver AI Overviews to users' hard and complicated queries on the SRP and in AI Mode."View the full article

Google is looking to hire a software engineer with the responsibility of improving the quality of User Generated Content (UGC) contents in Google Discover.View the full article

Google is hiring a Chief of Staff on Search Intelligence, Strategy and Operations. This job is to "help architect the next era of Search with AI," Rajan Patel, the Vice President of Search Engineering of Google, posted on LinkedIn.View the full article

Google may have hit those self-promotional and self-serving listicle articles in one of the more recent unconfirmed Google search ranking updates. Lily Ray dug into a pattern she spotted with these types of pieces of content, mostly in the SaaS space, being hit hard with the January Google updates.View the full article

Google announced that it will be reinstating the suspended hotels in Hotel Center and removing the Suspended Hotels" tab in the "Properties" page of your Hotel Center account.View the full article

Google seems to have a bug that prevents searchers from leaving hotel reviews directly in the Google Search desktop interface. It works fine within Google Maps and Hotel search interfaces but not in the web search interface.View the full article

Google is testing a new box that highlights that you can book the hotel at the official site, the hotel's direct website. This does not look like a sponsored result, but just a way to highlight the official website of the hotel.View the full article

Google Search seems to be super volatile today and yesterday, so I will call this the Google I/O 2025 Google unconfirmed update. I am seeing a spike in chatter within the SEO community along with many of the tools showing super heated volatility within the Google search results.View the full article

Today is Google I/O, where Google announces many of its new features across its products, including Google Search. It is not uncommon to see Google search ranking volatility spike around Google I/O, and that is exactly what we are seeing today - the morning of Google I/O.View the full article

This week was a huge week for search; between Google I/O and Google Marketing Live - it was just a lot. We had two unconfirmed Google ranking updates, one on I/O day and one on May 16th. Google announced AI Mode was...View the full article

Google is testing showing normal search ads in an ad carousel at the top of the image search results on mobile. The ads take up a lot of the top real estate of the image results and can be scrolled from side to side.View the full article

Google announced five new ways in how it is improving linking to web pages from AI Mode and AI Overviews. Some of these we saw Google testing earlier, and I (we) were fans of these changes and I am glad to see Google officially roll them out.View the full article

Google's John Mueller said, "The indexing API is inundated by bloggers trying to act like legitimate sites." This means that Google needs to be more careful about who and what they accept through the Google indexing API.View the full article

Google's Robby Stein reiterated that Google's AI experience, such as AI Mode and AI Overviews, integrates Google's core search signals. This helps Google provide more useful and helpful responses to users in the AI experiences. But it doesn't always get it right, as many of you know.View the full article

Remember the Power Pair from Google Marketing Live 2024? Well, that and several other items of discussion were found in internal emails at Google about the GML 2024 event. It discussed how advertisers were not excited about PMax, there is frustration amongst advertisers, being pushed into fully automated ads and they are just willing to go along with it.View the full article

Google is reportedly working on a new Gemini App user experience, which it is calling 2.0. The company is putting "huge investment" into this update of the Gemini user experience but we are not sure when this new look and experience will be released.View the full article

A year or more ago, Google added a toggle switch to use Gemini directly in the iOS Google Search app. Well, that was removed this week and you now need to go to the native Gemini app to use Gemini, you cannot use the Google app.View the full article