Link Building Strategies

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

Google has added a new promotion option to Google Merchant Center. The new option is Google Wallet. Google doesn't detail what this promotion does but it likely lets you promote that you accept Google Wallet for purchases.View the full article

Microsoft is telling Bing Search users when it is using history for some of its search features. Bing will show section named "History" and then say what history is knows about your searches.View the full article

Google is testing a new, more publisher-friendly version of the AI Overviews for recipe results. The new design has the recipe cards at the top, citations at the bottom and a shorter AI response.View the full article

Google is testing using the italic font type for the links in AI Mode. So the links have a bit of a slant to them, compared to the other text in the AI Mode response.View the full article

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

Microsoft is testing a new and updated layout for its Copilot product box/section within the Bing search results. It looks like they just swap the answer and product listing sections from one side to the other.View the full article

In June, Google began testing showing a new answer box for emoji related queries. So when you search for a specific type of emoji, Google will give you the emoji options that you can copy directly from the search results page instead of going to a third-party publisher site. Well, that seems fully live as of today.View the full article

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

This is just a programming note that I will be 100% offline starting Wednesday night (October 1st) through Thursday night (October 2nd) for Yom Kippur. I am not scheduling any stories on Yom Kippur...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

Google announced new message assets requirements for Google Ads. These new requirements aim "to ensure a good user experience" and go into effect on October 30, 2025.View the full article

Google is testing having the citations stick to the top (of the AI Overview section only) as you scroll down past the AI Overview. This keeps those citations more in view, as you scroll over the AI Overview.View the full article

Google announced that AI Mode had been updated to handle and respond more visually. So AI Mode responses both understand your queries in a more visual way and respond with more visual responses. Google said the responses aim at sparking inspiration, amongst other things.View the full article

Google Ads has announced several new features, including segmentation in asset reporting and enhancements to channel performance reporting. Google told me that this continues to provide advertisers with the visibility they are seeking.View the full article

Here is a new interview published yesterday by The Economic Times Podcasts with Elizabeth Reid, VP of Google Search. She spoke about Google's progression of AI in Search, content quality, SEO, blue links, traffic, the ecosystem, agentic features and more. View the full article

Google is testing not underlining the search result snippets when you hover your mouse cursor over the snippet. Generally, Google will add an underline to the title of the link (sometimes the whole snippet) when you hover over it. But here, Google is testing not doing that.View the full article

We covered the topic of taking over an old domain name from someone else and how that can sometimes be problematic in the Google SEO world. But here is a more recent comment from John Mueller of Google that is more encouraging on the topic.View the full article

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

Google added a new report to the Google AdSense reporting named traffic source breakdown. This report helps you understand the origins of your page traffic. It also categorizes traffic based on whether it arrived directly to your page, or from popular and classified platforms.View the full article

Google is testing a blue progress bar under the Shopping Ads carousel in the search results. As you scroll the carousel to see more products, the blue progress bar will indicate how much of the carousel is remaining to be seen.View the full article

As a reminder, Google dropped its unofficial support of showing 100 search results per page, which caused issues for third party tracking tools and even Search Console itself. The theory with Search Console is that the scrapers were injecting artificial data into Google and thus the reporting. But is the same happening with Google Ads reporting?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

Microsoft is testing using really large images in the Bing Search Copilot ads. I don't believe I've seen such large ads in this ad unit before, so it seems new to me.View the full article

OpenAI announced Instant Checkout in ChatGPT, allowing you to make purchases directly in ChatGPT. This is powered by the Agentic Commerce Protocol that is built with Stripe.View the full article