Link Building Strategies

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 unleashed its first core update of 2026...View the full article

This week, we covered the first core update of 2026, the February 2026 Discover core update. Meanwhile, there is an ongoing super-heated and volatile Google search rankings. Google has nothing to share about the recent unconfirmed ranking updates...View the full article

We saw Google test follow up questions below the AI Mode responses back in July. Now Google is testing follow up search suggestions, not necessarily in question format, at the bottom of some AI Mode results.View the full article

The Google Ads mixed campaign type experiment beta, which we covered the help document last month, seems to be going live for some advertisers. This feature allows advertisers to test multiple campaign types, budgets, and settings across campaigns in a single experiment.View the full article

We covered how horrific the AI-based Frankenstein recipes can be in Google Search, where it mashes up recipe steps from various publishers and acts like it is a real recipe from a source. Well, Bing had something similar but Jordi Ribas from Microsoft said they are "unshipping" the feature after the feedback was received. View the full article

Last week, Google updated the design for the Google Partner Portal for advertisers. Google said the new look makes it "simpler to understand your goals and to track all your points activity."View the full article

To fuel the debate in the SEO world of the topic of structured data and LLMs and AI engines, we are hearing that once again, AI engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity are not using structured data in any special way. View the full article

Google has released its first core update of 2026, which is focused on just Google Discover. Google named it the February 2026 Discover core update. This one is rolling over the next two weeks or so just English language users in the US and at some point will roll out beyond that to all countries and languages.View the full article

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

Google has launched what it calls Multi-party approval for Google Ads. "Multi-party approval (MPA) is a security feature for Google Ads designed to protect your account from unauthorized activity by requiring a second account administrator to verify high-risk changes," Google wrote.View the full article

Google is testing labeling some photos in the local hotel listings with "Good to Know" AI-generated descriptions of some of those photos. These labels seem to summarize what the photo and reviews say about the specific area of that hotel.View the full article

Google AdSense seems to be rolling out new metrics for the AdSense reports in the console. These include Browser breakdown, Hosting App breakdown and Operating system breakdown metrics.View the full article

Did you know that when Google AI Mode uses Personal Intelligence, Google will add icons of the various connected Google apps used to tailor your message. So you might see a Gmail icon, or Google Photos icon or Search or something else show up as a citation or source near the responses.View the full article

Microsoft Advertising is testing a new ad format within its newish Answer Card format called a magazine layout. These load ads in the card formats you see at the top of some of the Bing search results.View the full article

Google confirmed there is a bug with AI Overviews not showing links for some responses. The bug was spotted by Lily Ray, who posted some examples several hours ago. Rajan Patel, Google's VP, Engineering for Search, replied saying it is a bug and Google is working on fixing it.View the full article

Google reported its earnings today, its Q4 2025 earnings report showed ad revenues up by 14% at $82.3 billion and overall revenue was up 17% at $113.8 billion. I specifically like to dig in as best as I can on the ad revenue side to see how Google Ads have performed.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's search rankings are highly volatile...View the full article

I was hoping, well, not really, that Google would calm down a bit since we had such a volatile January. But the Google Search results volatility is still very volatile, and the shuffling in those results is still shaking up. View the full article

Microsoft announced the expansion of the Microsoft Publisher Content Marketplace. This marketplace is designed to give publishers a new revenue stream, provides AI systems with scaled access to premium content, and deliver better responses for consumers. In short, it will pay for using your content in its AI.View the full article

Google may have hit those self-promotional and self-serving listicle articles in one of the more recent unconfirmed Google search ranking updates. Lily Ray dug into a pattern she spotted with these types of pieces of content, mostly in the SaaS space, being hit hard with the January Google updates.View the full article

Google's John Mueller responded to a question on the pros and cons of serving raw markdown pages to LLM crawlers and bots. John didn't say much but he did list a number of concerns and things you should be on top of, if you do go down that avenue. View the full article

Mike Ryan posted data on the percentage of invalid clicks on the Google Ad Network, broken down by fraudulent clicks or likely accidental clicks. It shows the Google Display Network has the most invalid clicks, but search partners have the most fraudulent invalid clicks.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

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

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 says search algorithms, spam detection...View the full article