Link Building Strategies

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

It's been a while since Google has come out with a new search spam policy and penalty to accompany it with and now we have a new one, "back button hijacking." Back button hijacking is something many of us were surprised Google didn't specifically disallow but now, Google said it is on the rise and it is adding it to the list - officially.View the full article

Google's John Mueller said on Reddit that Google can handle and deal with having multiple URLs for a single web page, but it is not a good practice. He said it makes it harder for Google and Google will just pick one URL anyway. View the full article

Google has made some changes to the Google Business Profile policy document, specifically the identity change section. It is now much more descriptive than before.View the full article

As part of an article from The Verge taking aim at SEOs, Google says that they are aware of self-serving listicles and work to prevent this abuse from impacting results. View the full article

Google posted an update for the Google Ads and Google Analytics data controls yesterday where changes will be coming to the sources of the data. Google said this is to "simplify data controls and remove redundant settings between Google Analytics and Ads, we are planning to consolidate controls based on where the data is used."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. Catching up on the newsletter...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 announced that on August 20, 2026 it will experiment with an updated set of commonly used ad technology partners. If the experiments go well, Google will switch it "on or after June 5, 2026."View the full article

It looks like Google is testing a new report within Google Search Console named AI contribution. I have no clue what it looks like but I suspect it is a lot like the Bing Webmaster Tools AI performance reports.View the full article

Google was asked if it is possible to add a new status to the XML sitemap statuses for "still processing." John Mueller from Google responded on Blueshy saying, "I've chatted with the teams involved about this on & off, I've seen that it can be annoying." But he added he has nothing to announce.View the full article

Google's John Mueller reconfirmed that Google Search may simply ignore outbound links from sites that violate its search spam policies. This is not new, Google has been doing this manually and algorithmically for years now but he reiterated this on Bluesky.View the full article

On the latest Search Off The Record Podcast, Martin Split and Gary Illyes discussed the growing page weight issue and how that impacts users and Googlebot crawling. This follows Google updating its documentation to clarify file size limits for Googlebot (and various versions of Googlebot). View the full article

If you're using Gemini in Chrome (the sidebar you can summon via a button in Chrome), then you might be happy about the latest feature that showed up in Chrome Canary. After running a prompt...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

In January Google announced a change to how AI Overviews worked where clicking the "Show more" button at the end of an AIO would directly take you into AI Mode. But that was only on mobile. Now it seems Google is testing that functionality, but on desktop...View the full article

Google's Sundar Pichai was on the Cheeky Pint podcast and was asked about the future of Search. He basically laid out a future where Search is Jarvis-like where users will be completing tasks and have "many threads running"...View the full article

Spotted in the wild are what appear to be swipeable GBP location assets.View the full article

This is a programming note that I am completely offline for the last days of Passover holiday Wednesday and Thursday. I am likely not going to schedule any stories, I apologize (still in recovery mode). So I apologize for the lack of stories here. I hope to come back soon...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

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

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. Going offline for Passover tonight through Saturday night...View the full article

This is a programming note that I am completely offline for the Passover holiday Thursday and Friday. I am likely not going to schedule any stories, I apologize (still in recovery mode)...View the full article

Earlier this month, Google rolled out the "Ask Maps" feature. Now, Google said it is "available to everyone in the U.S. and India."View the full article

Google posted a new blog post named Inside Googlebot: demystifying crawling, fetching, and the bytes we process alongside episode 105 of the Search Off the Record segment named Google crawlers behind the scenes.View the full article