Link Building Strategies

Adam and Joanne Gallagher from the food recipe blog, Inspired Taste, has been documenting a lot of really painful and shameful tactics Google is using for its AI responses to some recipes. Adam calls its Google's AI Frankenstein recipes, where it pulls parts of the recipes from recipe bloggers, says it is the brand's recipe, but changes it enough where the recipe is not real and tastes horrible.View the full article

Google rolled an important change with how AI Mode works yesterday and it can have a big impact on the experience for desktop users. Now when users click a link in AI Mode...View the full article

John Mueller from Google had Danny Sullivan from Google on the Search Off the Record podcast to talk about "Thoughts on SEO & SEO for AI." In short, they both said SEO for AI is the same as SEO for traditional search but then they got into it.View the full article

Here is a new interview published yesterday by The Economic Times Podcasts with Elizabeth Reid, VP of Google Search. She spoke about Google's progression of AI in Search, content quality, SEO, blue links, traffic, the ecosystem, agentic features and more. View the full article

Google posted its first Winter Olympics Doodle, special logo, for the 2026 Winter Olympics. The first sport Google covered is curling. The Doodle is an animated GIF of an Olympian pushing the curling stone down the ice.View the full article

Gary Illyes from Google said that even for him "the change is hard to accept" when it comes to how search is changing and evolving with the new AI features. He said this in response to an article published on the Bing Webmaster Blog written by both Fabrice Canel'¯and Krishna Madhavan'¯of Microsoft named How AI Search Is Changing'¯the'¯Way'¯Conversions'¯are Measured.View the full article

Gary Illyes from Google reportedly said at event the other day that it is important for us to focus on originality in the coming year. "Originality is something we're going to be focusing on this year. That's going to be important," is how he was quoted.View the full article

Just like with Christmas day every year, so to with New Year's Day - Google's John Mueller and often other Googlers, are out and looking to respond to some questions on Google Search and SEO. John Mueller so far posted a few times on Reddit this morning, January 1, 2026.View the full article

John Mueller, a Google Search Analyst, responded to a question on Reddit named Is SEO still enough, or do we need to start thinking about GEO too? In short, John said you should look at the "full picture, and prioritize accordingly."View the full article

Google's John Mueller posted one of his one-liners, where he called some forms of SEO content as "digital mulch." He wrote, "And let's be honest'"most of that SEO content is just digital mulch. (...) If your blog exists solely to rank, it's living on borrowed time."View the full article

Google's John Mueller made a joke about how next year, SEO companies will be offering GEO-Detox services as a billable line item after many of the SEO companies already billed their clients for GEO services.View the full article

Google's John Mueller was asked what is the best CMS, content management system, is for SEO and ranking well on Google Search. John replied that all the modern CMS platforms are fine and there are no big differences, SEO-wise, between any of them.View the full article

Earlier this week, Google announced Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) and it has a lot of the industry worried. Once SEO named Ramon Eijkemans said, "I hate to bring this, but SEOs: we're gonna be f$@*ed." John Mueller from Google responded on Bluesky and said, "I disagree."View the full article

Every year, for the past 18 or so years, Google's John Mueller has been working on Christmas to provide support to those who need help with their Google Search ranking and SEO concerns. This year is no different; John Mueller has responded to several concerns on Reddit and other social media platforms today.View the full article

Alex Heath and Ellis Hamburger interviewed Google's head of Search, Liz Reid, on Google's progression of AI into Search. It felt like a very candid interview that is worth listening to. In short, Liz is still not sure if Gemini and Google Search will ever fully converge or not.View the full article

Google's March 2026 broad core update has officially completed rolling out. Google announced this via X this morning and the Search Status Dashboard has been updated to document the rollout. The update took 12 days and 4 hours to complete...View the full article

Ten months ago, Google said on stage at Google Search Central Live event in the Google Zurich office that we should expect more core update, more update. We now have about two months left of the 2025 year and we are in no way going to see more core updates, more often from Google.View the full article

About a week ago, if you searched for mortgage related math questions in Google Search, Google stopped giving you the answer. Google first introduced its mortgage calculator features a decade ago but suddenly the features disappeared last weekend.View the full article

Google has released the first major update to the search bar, the search box, ever - Google is calling it the intelligent Search box. We saw variations of this being tested over the past year, and now it is officially rolling out - as per Liz Reid, Google's Head of Search, via Google I/O.View the full article

Google has posted the New Year's Eve Doodle and New Year's Day Doodle on the Google.com home page for when it is New Year's Eve for you and New Year's Day for you.View the full article

Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, said that search ads with AI Overviews are at a baseline, at the same level as search ads without AI Overviews, in terms of ad revenue per query. He added, and now it is just about going up from there, and with AI, he doesn't see it to a problem.View the full article

Lenny Rachitsky interviewed Robby Stein, VP of Product at Google, who we cited here numerous times over the past couple of years. The interview covers how AI is not replacing search, search is not dead, how AI Mode will be incorporated within Google Search, how to do AEO or SEO for AI answers, how AI Mode came to market and more.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. And one of the questions she asked was on how to show up in these Google AI responses. Robby Stein essentially said there is a lot of overlap between normal SEO for web search but the key difference are the "the kinds of questions" people ask AI versus traditional search.View the full article

Nilay Patel of The Verge had a great one-on-one conversation with Sundar Pichai, Google's CEO. Nilay did put on the pressure around how the changes with AI Overviews and AI Mode in Google Search are impacting publishers in a very negative way, but Sundar seemed unconvinced that web publishing is dead.View the full article

The CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, said he spends time on X on launch days to monitor how real people are using, interacting, and experiencing new Google product releases. He said he is "pretty active on launch day trying to understand what's working."View the full article