Link Building Strategies

Gary Illyes, along with Martin Splitt, of Google posted a podcast explaining the top crawling challenges Google noticed amongst its 2025 year of crawling. The top challenges Google had with crawling included faceted navigation, action parameters, irrelevant parameters, calendar parameters and other "weird" parameters.View the full article

Google has completed the rollout of the August 2025 spam update, following a 27-day rollout cycle. This update started on August 26, 2025 and 12 pm ET, and was completed on September 22, 2025. This was a broad spam update, not a link spam update and was a pretty big and widespread update, similar to the December 2024 spam update but took 20 days longer to rollout.View the full article

We have known for a long time that Google can crawl web pages up to the first 15MB but now Google updated some of its help documentation to clarify that it will crawl the first 64MB of a PDF file and the first 2MB of other supported file types.View the full article

In February I shared how Grokipedia started dropping heavily in Google after initially surging. It became yet another example of what I call "Mt. AI". That's when sites scaling heavily with AI-generated content initially surge in Google, but then drop heavily as Google's systems...View the full article

There are some reports coming out that Grokipedia, the AI-based Wikipedia, is now showing a decline in search visibility in both Google and even ChatGPT. This comes after both an indexing and ranking surge in Google Search.View the full article

Google announced a logging error on Friday, April 3rd in the data anomalies report and explained that error prevented the accurate logging of impressions in GSC since May of 2025. That's right, almost a full year of inaccurate impressions...View the full article

Jordi Ribas, the Head of Search at Microsoft, touted Bing's growth on social media (X and LinkedIn). He wrote, "Since we launched Bing Chat in Feb 2023, we've seen significant growth in users, engagement and even market share on PC."View the full article

Earlier this month, we covered Google testing what we called contextual overlay link cards in AI Overviews and AI Mode. Well, Google officially began rolling them out yesterday, and they are more like hover-over pop-up link cards.View the full article

Google updated its image SEO best practices and Google Discover documentation to clarify how Google picks a preferred image thumbnail for Google Search and Google Discover. Google wrote it "uses both schema.org markup and the og:image meta tag as sources when determining image thumbnails in Google Search and Discover."View the full article

Google Search representatives often tell us to use the feedback link when we see something that is off or needs improvement with Google Search. Well, what happens when you use that feedback link?View the full article

The IAB and PwC released their annual Internet Advertising Revenue Report, which showed search ad grew 15.9% with $102 billion in ad dollars in 2024. Search ads made up the largest pie of internet ad spending at 39.8%.View the full article

Microsoft Bing announced some interesting updates for IndexNow including how it works now with product schema and that Shopify now supports it and soon Amazon will. This will help Bing and search engines that use IndexNow have more accurate and up-to-date products for their shopping results and shopping ads.View the full article

As a reminder, Google dropped its unofficial support of showing 100 search results per page, which caused issues for third party tracking tools and even Search Console itself. The theory with Search Console is that the scrapers were injecting artificial data into Google and thus the reporting. But is the same happening with Google Ads reporting?View the full article

New test places AI Overview citations on a white background without throwing any shade behind it. View the full article

There is some chatter in the SEO community that Google Image Search may be down ranking, lowering the rankings, of AI-generated images, in favor of non-AI-generated images within the Google Image search results.View the full article

It is January 2026, and it is now time for the monthly Google Webmaster report, where I recap the most important Google organic stories of the past month. Obviously, the Google December 2025 core update was the big one, it ran for 18 days and it really had a large impact on many sites.View the full article

Dwarkesh Patel interviewed Jeff Dean and Noam Shazeer of Google and one topic he asked about what would it be like to merge or combine Google Search with in-context learning. It resulted in a fascinating answer from Jeff Dean.View the full article

Jerry Dischler, the almost 20 year Google executive, is reportedly leaving Google a year and a half after he stepped down from that position. Jerry Dischler was involved in a lot of the Department of Justice negativity around Google's ad business, which may or may not be related to him stepping down in 2023 and now reportedly leaving Google in 2025.View the full article

John Mueller, who works on the Google Search team, responded to a question that asks, "Does extensive Schema markup actually help Large Language Models (LLMs) understand your entity better, or is it just for Google Rich Snippets?" He responded to the question, prefacing it that it is his point of view and "this is not official guidance."View the full article

A US judge ruled Google acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in some ad tech. This is the second time a judge ruled Google willfully engaged in monopolistic practices. The remedies for these rulings are still being worked out but may strengthen the case to have Google's business broken up.View the full article

Here is another interview from Google's head of search, Liz Reid. This one was done on the Odd Lots Bloomberg podcast and is titled "Google's Liz Reid on Who Will Own Search in a World of AI."View the full article

Google has removed a whole section from its JavaScript SEO documentation because it was outdated and Google says loading content with JavaScript does not make it hard for Google Search.View the full article

Apple is reportedly launching local ads within Apple Maps, as soon as this month. "Apple Inc. is preparing to introduce advertising in its Maps app, part of a broader push to generate more money from services," Bloomberg wrote.View the full article

Since March 1st, there are many Google Ads accounts that are not serving ads. The Google Ads forum is filled with complaints about this and as far as I can tell, I cannot find a single response from an official Google Ads representative (as of yet).View the full article

It is time for the monthly Google Webmaster Report. We are now in March as we continue to wait for the first Google core update of 2025. We did have a number of big unconfirmed Google updates, as documented below. View the full article