Link Building Strategies

For the past several years now, John Mueller of Google would come out with what he calls the "Mueller Report of SEO memes." Well, here is his 2025 edition of the Mueller Report of SEO memes. It is fun to scan through, so I'll just embed them all.View the full article

Ryan Moulton, a Google Search engineer who worked on Google's search rankings algorithms for over 18 years now, went to X to call out some of what the courts are saying as not true. He went on to say, "This is now the second time I've seen my work cited prominently in a major lawsuit against Google, and I have to say, it has not given me a lot of faith in the court process around issues like this."View the full article

Today marks the 22nd anniversary of when I started this site, the Search Engine Roundtable. I was 23 years old when I started this site, compiling what the search community and search industry was talking about and...View the full article

A judge has ruled, giving Google a blow in its ad tech monopoly legal battle. This ruling should help the plaintiffs suing Google not get hung up in court as long as some expected, plus Google can't relitgate the core facts in that antitrust case.View the full article

Google sent out an email to advertisers yesterday about changes coming to Google Tag Manager. Specifically, Google Tag Manager will send events before loading a Google tag and Google calls this a "small change" that "will not harm measurement performance."View the full article

There are a number of advertisers in the local space who are complaining that the lead quality has been worse than ever in the past few months. They blame the new automated ad credits system, which removed the method for advertisers to manually request lead credits for poor quality leads.View the full article

New data from AlsoAsked put AI-generated people also ask in Google Search at 38%. These are people also ask responses labeled as AI generated and that number jumped from 17.8% just a few months ago.View the full article

Google / Alphabet reported its Q4 2024 earnings last night, where its ad revenue hit $72.46 billion, up 10.6% from last year's quarter of $65.52 billion. Google's revenue was up 12% with $96.47 billion and its profit was up 30.7% to $30.9B. Search revenue specifically was up 12.5% to $54 billion.View the full article

On Friday afternoon, Danny Goodwin covered a 170 or so page PDF that Search Engine Land received from an anonymous tip named "Preference Ranking Guidelines." It looks to me similar to the Google Quality Raters guidelines that continuously leaked until Google began publishing them for all to see.View the full article

Google has confirmed that Apple will be adding its Gemini AI service to Apple Intelligence by the end of 2025, reports are saying. We knew this would happen but we should also expect Apple to add not just Gemini but other AI services to Apple Intelligence. View the full article

Apple seems like it may be preparing integration Google Gemini in Apple Intelligence as an option for its users to select. Aaron Perris from MacRumors spotted hints in the iOS 18.4 beta code that Google is listed alongside OpenAI as a "third party model."View the full article

Apple announced this week that it partnered with MICHELIN Guide; The Infatuation and Golf Digest to provide "insights, ratings, and reviews from expert sources" within Apple Maps. View the full article

Yesterday, Apple's Eddy Cue said searches on Google via Safari were down last month for the first time in 22 years. Then later, Google issued a statement saying there was an "increase in total queries coming from Apple's devices and platforms."View the full article

Apple has made some updates to its Applebot documentation, primarily explaining the difference between the normal Applebot crawler and the Applebot-Extended crawler. To be clear, Applebot-Extended is not new, Apple introduced it about a year ago but Apple wanted to clarify how blocking Applebot-Extended impacts Applebot, if at all.View the full article

It's time for the monthly Google Webmaster Report - the April 2025 version. This month we had the Google March 2025 core update kick off and finish rolling out. Google launched AI Mode, AI Overviews are now powered by Gemini 2.0, we saw some weird AI search tests, expansion of AI Overviews and a whole slew of AI changes.View the full article

It looks like Microsoft is testing search ads that auto expand to reveal sitelinks under those ads within the Bing Search results. You don't need to click or do anything and the ad will dynamically expand to show more sitelinks underneath the search ad unit.View the full article

Microsoft is testing putting a shopping bag icon on its "Shop Now" Bing Ads layout. I cannot replicate this but normally Bing shows a button that says "Shop Now" and that is it, but in this test, Bing is adding a bag icon before the "Shop Now" text.View the full article

Microsoft is testing placing a new tag on some sponsored ads within the Bing Search results. This tag is in blue and says "Local Business," which I guess helps promote local businesses near you.View the full article

Recently, I've been complaining that Google is linking many of its search features back to more search results, this is also includes the AI Overviews. Well, Bing Search is also doing this for some of their AI-based answer snippets.View the full article

Microsoft Bing's shopping carousel results have a "buy now" button that now links directly to the checkout page of the merchant. So when you click on buy now, it adds that item directly to the cart of the merchant's website.View the full article

Microsoft has this new style for some of the Bing Search Copilot answers. They can show a card or box that has a tabbed carousel where you can swipe through different sections of an article to get different categories of answers for the topic.View the full article

Microsoft is now placing quick buttons or tabs to quickly jump from the Bing Copilot Answer to Bing image or video search results. I am not sure why or when Bing decides to show this but they are, for some (not all) queries that respond with a Copilot Answer. View the full article

Microsoft Bing is testing placing a "more videos" section in the Bing Copilot answers. Recently we covered how Bing placed images and video links but this implementation makes more sense.View the full article

I believe generally when you search Bing and get a Copilot answer at the top, Bing will just immediately show you the answer. Now, Microsoft is testing an animated response where Bing writes out the answer like a chatbot.View the full article

Microsoft is testing adding a read more link to the Bing Copilot Answers in Bing Search. The read more link will expand the answer to show more content, generating a more detailed and longer answer for your query.View the full article