Link Building Strategies

As you know, Google announced a new search spam penalty for back button hijacking. Site owners have until June 15, 2026 to remove any such functionality from its site or it will be subject to a manual action and/or automated algorithmic adjustment. Now, Google is sending email notifications through Search Console as reminders.View the full article

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web. Google and Microsoft reported earnings...View the full article

I missed last month's Google Webmaster Report, so I am combining both April and May into one big report. Google completed rolling out the March 2026 spam update in March, and started the March core update, which completed in April. We also had a lot of other ranking volatility throughout.View the full article

Google is testing a new label for the search results snippet named "Fresh updates." This was spotted on a weather website result, Accuweather. 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

Google posted new developer documentation for how to authenticate requests with Web Bot Auth. This is a "new cryptographic protocol that helps websites to validate that bots are authentic," Google wrote.View the full article

Microsoft, during its earnings call last week, announced that Bing hit a huge milestone of 1 billion monthly active users. Krishna Madhavan from Microsoft later confirmed these "users" do not include AI agents but are real actual humans.View the full article

Google seems to be suspending Google Business Profiles due to user account restrictions. There may have been a wave of suspensions over the past several days related to this issue and local SEO experts are unclear if this is a bug or some other issue.View the full article

Google is showing the full author name and the source, like LinkedIn - and name or Medium - and name, for the citations. It makes sense for these social platforms to show the name, because anyone can write anything on these platforms, so knowing the name makes it more useful.View the full article

Microsoft Advertising custom columns now support all conversion metrics - instead of just specific conversion metrics. This gives advertisers more flexibility on tracking campaign performance.View the full article

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web. We are seeing new Google search ranking volatility heat up today, it seems weird...View the full article

Did you know that Bing Webmaster Tools treats http and https as the same property, it does not distinguish between http and https? This is different from Google Search Console, which lets you set up a property for each and every variation. View the full article

Microsoft Bing is testing making the links within the AI results, the Copilot Search results, less clickable. Typically, the whole line of text is clickable to the citation but here, Bing is testing only linking the citation mark at the end.View the full article

Google's Ginny Marvin, the Ads Liaison, has confirmed there are delays for some Demand Gen Image ads to be approved. Some of these delays are several days pending, not hours, but several days.View the full article

I am seeing new signs of the Google search ranking volatility heating up. When I reported on it last week, the tools began to show volatility trend upwards. But now, while some of the tools are calm, the chatter within the forums has spiked over the past 24 hours or so.View the full article

Google is now showing the number of reviews that were deleted on a specific Google Business Profile due to defamation complaints. This seems to be live in Germany and not other countries right now.View the full article

Google is testing removing some of the action buttons on local panels, Google Business Profiles, including call and share, and replacing it with a numbered show more button. Clicking on that button opens up those additional action options.View the full article

Google Ads seems to have added a new tab to the recommendations section named "results." I assume this section will show the results of any implemented recommendations you selected within your Google Ads campaigns.View the full article

Google Ads is testing more transparency around its partner network, letting some advertisers select if they want to run their ads on the search partner network and/or Google Display Network. It is labeled Partners in Alfa. View the full article

Google may be testing showing more links and citations within the AI Mode results. Google has done this with AI Overviews a year or so ago and now may be testing it with AI Mode results.View the full article

Similarweb published some data sharing the click-through rates for OpenAI's ChatGPT ads. The overall CTR for ChatGPT ads are 0.68%, the top quartile is 1%, the best brands are 1.57% and the peak CTR is 5.4%.View the full article

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...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

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web...View the full article

Google proposed a number of changes to the EU in order to avoid fines from the European Union. One of those changes is around the site reputation abuse policy, which the EU watchdog said directly impacts a common and legitimate way for publishers to monetize their websites and content.View the full article