Link Building Strategies

Google released an update to Nano Banana yesterday named Nano Banana Pro and it is super impressive as an image generation tool. But it is also incorporated into Google Search via Google AI Mode and available within Google Ads to help you make ad creatives.View the full article

We've only covered the Department of Justice vs Google documents here and there but here are some documents that may be of interest to the community here. Google said Navboost is not a machine learning system, instead it is more of a big table. And there are more documents including one on hand crafting signals and another on a debugging interface.View the full article

A month ago, we reported Google added a new form to report negative review extortion scams on your Google Business Profiles and local listings. Google also listed some tips on how to handle these extortion attempts. But I am glad to report that some local SEOs are saying this form is working and those extortion reviews are being removed by Google.View the full article

On Wednesday, Google announced a number of new AI features, which we covered (links below) but one other feature Google spoke about was "AI-powered article overviews." This is an experiment Google News is trying with a handful of publishers.View the full article

Last month we reported that Google News Publisher Center changes are coming, well those changes should have happened and been fully completed by today. Google updated its help document on the topic to say "Google News is fully transitioning to automatically generated publication pages in late March 2025."View the full article

New label tests for news results in the Google Discover feed could make certain news results more clickable. View the full article

Google is now sending email notifications for when Google Business Profiles has removed the restrictions on your reviews and ratings. The email says, "Restrictions on your reviews and ratings have been removed" and it comes from the Google Business Profiles team.View the full article

Back in October, we saw Google testing having the "Show more" button in the AI Overviews within Google Search jump you to AI Mode with follow-up questions. Well, Google's Robby Stein announced on X yesterday that this is being tested (after it was tested already) in the mobile search results.View the full article

Brad Geddes dug into how he felt "AI Max can The President your existing exact and phrase match keywords and then claim credit for the conversions and revenue." And then Google's Ad Liaison, Ginny Marvin responded to those specific examples on why this happened and what Google is changing in the future with Google Ads AI Max.View the full article

Nikola Todorovic, Director of Software Engineering at Google Search, spoke about a presentation he gave at Zurich in December at Google Search Central live (I was there). He dug into it on a recent Search Off the Record named How AI Is Changing Google Search and SEO. In there, he explained how AI and machine learning have been used in isolation within Google Search.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

Danny Sullivan from Google spoke at the Google Search Central event in Toronto a couple of days ago and a few of his slides spoke about it is important to produce "unique, authentic and non-commodity content." And then Sullivan dug into what commodity content is.View the full article

As you know, January was an incredibly intense month of Google Search ranking volatility. It surprised me that Google has still not confirmed that a Google search ranking update took place. Now, John Mueller of Google was asked about it and said, "Unfortunately, I don't have any insights / updates to share."View the full article

Google's John Mueller responded to a question on the pros and cons of serving raw markdown pages to LLM crawlers and bots. John didn't say much but he did list a number of concerns and things you should be on top of, if you do go down that avenue. View the full article

Google's John Mueller explained, one again, why it takes weeks to roll out a core update. It is often because there are different components to core updates through the rollout stages, and each needs to be pushed individually. 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

Last week, Google updated the design for the Google Partner Portal for advertisers. Google said the new look makes it "simpler to understand your goals and to track all your points activity."View the full article

There is a Google patent named AI-generated content page tailored to a specific user. It describes the use of AI to create custom landing pages and when a user performs a search, Google Search sends the user to the AI-generated page instead of the page on the company's website.View the full article

Google announced it has added Waze ads inventory to Performance Max for store goals campaigns and Channel performance reporting is now available in all Performance Max campaigns in Google Ads.View the full article

We covered the topic of Google's AI Frankenstein recipes and how bad it is for recipe bloggers and publishers. But when you have Google's Personal Intelligence serve up these Frankenstein chunks of content, it makes it so much worse.View the full article

Did you know that when Google AI Mode uses Personal Intelligence, Google will add icons of the various connected Google apps used to tailor your message. So you might see a Gmail icon, or Google Photos icon or Search or something else show up as a citation or source near the responses.View the full article

Google's Robby Stein confirmed (again) that Google is personalizing some of the AI experiences, including AI Overviews and AI Mode. He said this on the CNN, Terms of Service podcast with Clare Duffy.View the full article

We've seen variations of Google's popular products section in the search results show both article and video content reviews. But now we are seeing another format for it, one that even links to laptop reviews from 55 years ago, a good ten years before the Osborne 1 hit shelves.View the full article

Google has officially launched scheduling and multi-location publishing for Google Posts in Google Business Profiles. This was a feature Google tested last month and is now fully live.View the full article

Recently, Google rolled out the ability to schedule Google Posts. Supposedly, soon, Google will also roll out recurring scheduling for posts. So you can set a Google Post to repeat and post over and over again on a schedule.View the full article