Link Building Strategies

Google has a "new feature," as it labeled it, within Google Merchant Center, for event promotions. This allows you to promote an event, such as a sale, promotion or occasion, that may help you sell product.View the full article

Google Merchant Center has added a new report named popular products report. This report will show you your popular products, popular brands, top-selling products, etc, all on Google.View the full article

Google added a new promotion targeting option to Google Merchant Center for audience targeting. The option is labeled "preferred audience" and is available when setting up a promotion.View the full article

Google has documented a new user agent, a user-triggered fetcher, named Google-Pinpoint. "The Google-Pinpoint fetcher requests individual URLs that Pinpoint users specified as sources for their personal collections of documents," Google posted in its updated documentation.View the full article

Google added a new crawler, robot, to its list of user-triggered fetchers in the Google crawlers documentation. This specific bot is named Google Messages and it is a fetcher "used to generate link previews for URLs sent in chat messages," Google wrote.View the full article

The NY Times commissioned a study that says AI Overviews have holes in both grounding and accuracy. 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

A couple of weeks ago, Google stunned many by saying that they updated their spam report to pass along all information to the site that you enter in the spam report. There was a lot of backlash to that and Google reverted, now saying if there is personally identifying information, it won't process the spam report at all.View the full article

We had a few unconfirmed but big Google search ranking updates but we are still waiting on an official core update...View the full article

We've been keeping track of the bots, spiders, OpenAI has been releasing. OpenAI just posted about a new bot for ads, it is named OAI-AdsBot.View the full article

Google's spam update completed after almost a month rollout, it was pretty wild and got even more wild after the rollout completed. Google AI Mode rolled out to more languages, is more visual, is testing agentic experiences and much more. Google dropped the num parameter causing a huge mess for so many of us.View the full article

In early March, it was leaked that Google Ads will be rolling out channel reporting for Performance Max campaigns. Well, now it is official, Google said they are introducing "'­new'¬'­ channel-level'¬'­ reporting'¬'­ in'¬'­ Performance'¬'­ Max" plus, "full'¬'­ search'¬'­ terms'¬'­ reporting'¬ and'¬'­ more'¬'­ detailed'¬'­ asset'¬'­ reporting'¬'­ that'¬'­ show'¬'­ you'¬'­ all'¬'­ the'¬'­ metrics'¬'­ for'¬'­ individual'¬'­ assets.'¬"View the full article

It is now official, Google confirmed it has entered "into a multi-year collaboration" with Apple to power Apple Intelligence features and Siri with Google's Gemini models and cloud technology.View the full article

A month ago, we reported that Google was testing linking words in the AI Overviews back to its own search results. We felt this set a horrible message but hey, Google did not, instead, Google made it an official feature of AI Overviews because it helps "people more easily explore topics and discover relevant websites," the company told me.View the full article

In December, Google told us they are testing powering AI Overviews using Gemini 2.0. We think we even saw Google testing this in the wild with deeper AI Overviews with tons of links. Well, now, in the U.S. AI Overviews are officially powered by Gemini 2.0, it is no longer a test.View the full article

A few weeks ago, we uncovered the beta self-serve Ads Manager for ChatGPT Ads. It was before it officially launched but now OpenAI officially announced its "beta self-serve Ads Manager that allows advertisers in the US to sign up and purchase ads directly to appear in ChatGPT."View the full article

Google Ads has this new way to preview your Performance Max campaign ads, with one click. Now you can easily preview your PMax asset group ads from the table by clicking on the images.View the full article

Google Search Console has a bug with its API when filtering on the searchAppearance dimension. This bug occurs when using the notEquals or notContains operators, it will only return rows with the excluded value, instead of excluding those rows.View the full article

OpenAI's ChatGPT web search feature does offer a web cache, an offline, locally stored version of web pages that have been previously crawled. This should not come as a surprise, as all search engines store cached versions of web pages (even if they don't show it to us).View the full article

OpenAI has officially launched ads in ChatGPT yesterday. The company announced, "Today, we're beginning to test ads in ChatGPT in the U.S. The test will be for logged-in adult users on the Free and Go subscription tiers. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education tiers will not have ads."View the full article

As you may have heard, the latest AI-powered web browser launched yesterday, the much-anticipated OpenAI ChatGPT web browser. OpenAI named its web browser Atlas. The built-in search features seem to be mostly powered by Google Search, for some reason.View the full article

If you look at the source code in some of the responses OpenAI's ChatGPT gives you, you may now see references to ads. The response in the source code says, "InReply to user query using the following additional context of ads shown to the user."View the full article

OpenAI is reportedly scaling up its crawling infrastructure for the holiday shopping season. The folks at Vercel noticed OpenAI adding a lot of new IP ranges for its bots and crawlers.View the full article

As you know, OpenAI will soon show ads on ChatGPT, but now we are hearing that those ads will be charged on a pay-per-view, impression-based model, not a click-based, cost-per-click model.View the full article

OpenAI has updated its spider/crawler it uses for ChatGPT, OAI-SearchBot. The AI company updated the description and details of the crawler information removing that it is used for links and to train OpenAI's generative AI foundation models.View the full article