Link Building Strategies

Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison, has confirmed that demographic exclusions will apply to Shopping inventory in Performance Max campaigns. Marvin added that the reporting on how this is shown to advertisers is still to be determined, but the goal is to let advertisers control which age groups can or cannot see the ads.View the full article

Google has told us that core updates impact visibility within Google Discover, but that may have changed at some point. Andy Almeida from the Google Trust and Safety spoke about Google Discover and one of his slides wrote, "Minimal alignment to Search ranking..."View the full article

Supposedly, there is this "hack" to "crack the code" to make your Local Service Ads work in Google Ads that is fake and not recommended. Folks are saying if your LSAs are not working, you should close that Google Ads account and make a new one. But Google and LSA experts are saying otherwise.View the full article

Google's John Mueller said he would "caution against assuming that you need to do this level of analysis for all URLs on a website in order to achieve optimal SEO" when it comes to reviewing bad redirects or CSP settings. Why, because bad redirects or CSP settings are often simply visible when doing normal browsing, and if you see it, then that is enough.View the full article

Google's Danny Sullivan said on the Search Off the Record podcast that was published yesterday that Google does not want you to turn your content into bite-sized chunks to rank well in LLMs. He said, "we don't want you to do that" and he even spoke to Google engineers about this.View the full article

Gary Illyes from Google ranted on Bluesky about folks updating the lastmod date in their sitemap files when all they have changed was the date in their footers copyright line from 2024 to 2025. Gary said, don't do it, it is not enough of a change to the page's content to warrant a lastmod date update.View the full article

If you embed resources on your pages, those embedded resources can be cached longer than other parts of the page in Google Search. View the full article

While a number of Google Search features are impacted by Google's core update, favicons showing up or not is not one of them. Yes, your site can drop in the rankings, or not show up in Google Discover, or be removed from Top Stories and other features but favicons are not impacted by core updates.View the full article

Google's John Mueller said having "four identical links on a page to another page seems fine & common to me." He said, don't worry if you have that in your navigation, and implied it won't have an impact on your SEO.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

Google has posted an update on the reviews bug we first reported on a week ago, that it later confirmed this past Monday and we saw a fix rolling out starting on Tuesday. The short, it is not yet fully fixed but it should be in the coming few days.View the full article

Google's John Mueller said that implementing hotlink protections with carve-outs for search engines are fine. He added that this is not really a thing sites do that much these days, stating it was a thing in 2010's or so but not now.View the full article

Did you ever want to validate to see if Google or other search engines can see your tabbed (hidden in a tab) navigation or content? Well, John Mueller from Google listed some ideas on how to do so.View the full article

Google's John Mueller explained that just because you use hreflang tags on your pages, it doesn't mean those pages will be indexed and/or ranked in Google Search. He said on Bluesky, "hreflang doesn't guarantee indexing."View the full article

Google's John Mueller said if you have hreflang tags that point to a 301 redirect, it is probably okay. But you probably also want to automate the process of setting up those hreflang tags so that there is no redirect.View the full article

Google admitted in a video published on its own Search Central YouTube channel that if searchers do not use your page(s) in the search results, those pages may stop showing up in the search results. Martin Splitt said this in a recent YouTube short he posted where he said, "if pages fall off the index again... users don't really use them in search results."View the full article

Google's John Mueller pretty much said that using image streaming techniques will not result in an SEO friendly outcome. He actually said, "It's a great way to prevent your images from being found through search engines."View the full article

Google's John Mueller was asked if it was acceptable to link your brand websites together on a brand page to communicate to your users that the company owns multiple brands. John said, it is pretty common to do so and if done as a reasonable scale, it is fine to do.View the full article

Google held the Search Central Live event in Dubai just a couple of days ago. It seems like the vast majority of what was presented at the event was presented at prior events. But I wanted to share that Google again said that links or site moves or technical SEO won't fix your rankings if you have overall quality issues with your site.View the full article

John Mueller from Google said that merging content is always more challenging than a basic site move. Meaning, when you take a look at your content on your site and decide to merge a bunch of the content into fewer URLs, that takes longer for Google to handle than moving a site from domain A to domain B with no other changes.View the full article

Google's John Mueller again spoke about the disavow link file. This time he said that while "most sites don't need it, he added but "that's not all sites." Some sites may indeed need to disavow links.View the full article

Google's John Mueller was quick to debunk a claim that owning an .esports domain will have no positive SEO effect. He said on Bluesky, "There's no positive SEO effect from a TLD like that."View the full article

As I covered yesterday, Google is going to redirect its ccTLDs to Google.com. And as I reported yesterday, Google also said "it won't affect the way Search works." Despite Google saying that, there are tons of people in our industry thinking that international SEO has changed with this announcement - it has not.View the full article

We covered the topic of taking over an old domain name from someone else and how that can sometimes be problematic in the Google SEO world. But here is a more recent comment from John Mueller of Google that is more encouraging on the topic.View the full article

Google's John Mueller said on Reddit that when picking a site name, make sure to pick something that you can reasonably expect to rank for. In short, don't go online and complain that your site is named Best SEO blog and you don't rank in the number one position in Google Search for [best SEO blog].View the full article