Link Building Strategies

Fabrice Canel and Krishna Madhavan from the Microsoft Bing team posted a useful blog post named Does Duplicate Content Hurt SEO and AI Search Visibility? The short answer is yes, and the long answer is also yes.View the full article

For the past 15 or so years, Google would post holiday-specific decorations at the top of its search results for Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa. Well, this year Google did not. Google did post an Easter egg in the search results, which they do every year, and it posted the season's greeting Doodle, but not the holiday-specific decorations. View the full article

This week in search, we covered an update on the Google December 2025 core update. Google Search traffic to news publishers continues to vanish, but there is Google Discover. A report shows Google has deleted a ton...View the full article

Google is testing swapping out the Gemini button at the top right of the Chrome browser, with a "Browse with AI" button. The button is more colorful and in your face, which probably gets more users to notice it.View the full article

Google Ads has a new experiment feature for Performance Max campaigns that lets you A/B-test assets. This allows you to compare the performance of 2 different sets of assets within the same asset group to find out which creative combination works best for your Performance Max campaign.View the full article

For the past year or so, I've seen a growing number of complaints about Google Ads accounts being hijacked. It seems to be getting worse, even after we covered the Google Ads account hijacks last November. So how do you reduce the chances of your Google Ads account being hijacked?View the full article

Google just announced it is looking into ways to allow websites to specifically opt out of Google using its content in the Search generative AI features such as AI Overviews and AI Mode. This comes based on UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) new requirements for Google Search.View the full article

January has been an insane month with Google Search ranking volatility, and I guess it is no surprise to see the most heated time right now, as we end the month. I am seeing a significant spike in SEO chatter and many of the tools are showing very heated Google search ranking volatility over the past 24 hours or so.View the full article

Earlier this month, we reported that Google updated two of its help documents around Google's crawler file size limits. Well, Google made a clarification to one of those documents the other day after some confusion within the SEO industry.View the full article

Microsoft is testing bolding the title links in the Bing search results for both the organic and paid listings. I am not sure if this was a bug or a test, but I suspect it was a test.View the full article

A year ago, we learned that Google would transition from Google call ads, call-only ads, to using call assets within responsive search ads (RSAs) but we didn't know the dates. Now, Google said this will happen in two phases: February 2026 and February 2027.View the full article

This is a programming note that Tuesday and Wednesday are Sukkot and I will be offline the next two days. I will be offline on Tuesday and Wednesday, October 7th and October 8th.View the full article

Google updated the wording in the title documentation for Merchant Center, now suggesting you can use your own brand or company name in the short title of your products. That is, if you manufacture your own products.View the full article

The Microsoft Advertising blog posted about how to optimize for AI Search Answers. I thought it was weird to see this on the Microsoft Advertising blog and not on the Bing Search blog, because (a) it is an ad blog and (b) it was written by Krishna Madhavan, who is part of the Bing team, not ad team.View the full article

Google has published a new help document on the topic of Google Business Profile negative review extortion scams. The document explains what they are, how to report the scam, what to expect and more importantly, what not to do.View the full article

Google now supports Sitelinks for local search ads in the Google Maps interface. They show in the form of a carousel, under a sponsored ad listing in the Google Maps interface.View the full article

We've seen at least two variations of Google local and Business Profiles showing related to your search boxes, but this new one looks a bit more tidy than the Q&A carousel and Google Posts carousel version.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 local reviews are disappearing...View the full article

Google's John Mueller reminded us about when case sensitivity matters for Google Search and SEO when it comes to your URLs. In short, Google will probably figure it out based on two URLs having the same content on it but why leave it up to Google, so make sure to be consistent with your URLs so Google doesn't need to figure it out.View the full article

About a week ago, if you searched for [disney account] and looked at the Disney search result listing in Google Search, you'd see a sitelink that reads, "Black hat SEO approaches..." And guess what, that sitelink is still live.View the full article

Robby Stein, VP of Product for Google Search, was interviewed on the Silicon Valley Girl channel by Marina Mogilko about AI Search at Google. He explained how to do SEO for AI Mode and he was crystal clear that Google Ads is not going away with the release of these new AI features.View the full article

Grokipedia, an AI-generated online encyclopedia launched a week ago with over 800,000 AI-generated pages, and both Google and Bing have already indexed hundreds, if not thousands, of those AI-generated pages.View the full article

Google updated its Circumventing systems policy to add a new section for Advertiser verification. In short, and as Google wrote, "Providing false or fraudulent information as part of our Advertiser verification programs is not allowed."View the full article

Starting maybe late Thursday, into Friday, November 7th, I started to feel a Google Search ranking update and volatility brewing. Like I've been saying since the num=100 parameter change, it has been harder to validate those feelings, but based on the chatter I have been seeing in the SEO community and some of the third-party Google Search tracking tools, I think there was a Google update around November 7, 2025.View the full article

Last week, Google announced Opal, a Google Labs project, expanded to more regions. Well, it also explained how you can use this tool to create optimized content in a scalable way - consistently and quickly, without much human intervention. Yea, does this seem like something that might be against the Google Search guidelines? View the full article