Link Building Strategies

About a week ago, if you searched for [disney account] and looked at the Disney search result listing in Google Search, you'd see a sitelink that reads, "Black hat SEO approaches..." And guess what, that sitelink is still live.View the full article

I've been watching the volatility ever since the unconfirmed February 26th or so ranking volatility when the tools didn't show much of a spike but the chatter was super high. Well, the tools started to show the spike around March 1st and the chatter is still heated.View the full article

While this month was not as busy as last month, it was still a pretty stressful month for a lot of site owners and SEOs. I was expecting more core updates this past month, but we had none, whereas the previous report, we covered three confirmed Google updates.View the full article

The Financial Times has a detailed interview with the newish Head of Google Search, Elizabeth Reid. The interview can be gated, so here are some of the quotes that stood out most to me from this interview.View the full article

In December, Google Merchant Center introduced a new field for "first order" discount. Now, we are seeing "First order" labels in the Google Shopping Ads within the Google Search results.View the full article

There are a nice number of reports of GA4, Google Analytics, showing a huge surge in organic search traffic over the past couple of days, but Google Search Console is not showing any increase, it remains flat. Some are suspecting this is the result of fake bot traffic not being filtered by GA4, but others are not sure.View the full article

Google is bringing Gemini 3 Flash to AI Mode, bringing much of Gemini 3's power without waiting too long - hence the "Flash" part of the name. Robby Stein from Google said, "Starting today, we're rolling it out globally in Search as the default model in AI Mode."View the full article

I know Google said on November 18th that Gemini 3 was "shipping in Search on day one." But no, it shipped on November 26th instead. Nick Fox, SVP at Google, said on X, "We've just shipped intelligent automatic model routing to Gemini 3 Pro for your toughest questions in AI Mode."View the full article

Google Maps is getting an update from Gemini where you can ask Google Maps questions about locations, where Google Maps can give you more human directions and Google Maps with Lens can tell you more about a store or location.View the full article

As you know, Google updated its Search Quality Raters guidelines with 11 new pages a couple of weeks ago. But with that, Google also added the term "generative AI" to the quality raters guidelines for the first time, and it is listed 14 times.View the full article

Grokipedia, an AI-generated online encyclopedia launched a week ago with over 800,000 AI-generated pages, and both Google and Bing have already indexed hundreds, if not thousands, of those AI-generated pages.View the full article

Both Google and Microsoft reported its earnings today; Alphabet's Q3 2025 earnings and Microsoft's Q1 2026 earnings. Google reported ad revenues up by XX% with $ and Microsoft reported ad revenues up by XX%.View the full article

Google reported earnings and their ad revenue is up again year-over-year, with an increase of 8.5%, and overall revenue is also up 12%. I should note, it is down from Q4 because Q4 is always Google's best performing quarter, which is why you don't really compare the it to the last quarter, but rather the same quarter from a year ago.View the full article

A month ago, Google added LLMs.txt files to many of its developer and documentation sites including the Search developer docs. As you know, Google pulled it off the Search developer docs within a day or so but the LLMs.txt files still remain on many of Google's other sites.View the full article

Google added a new user agent to the Googlebot's user-triggered fetchers documentation. The new user agent is for the Chrome Web Store named Google-CWS.View the full article

Google added Google NotebookLM to the list of Google crawlers, under the list of user-triggered fetchers. Google said they added this user-agent "based on feedback."View the full article

A couple of weeks ago, Google added a new help page titled Discover feed source overview. This page discusses those cards in the Google Discover feed and when Google gets the source name wrong, like for those entity Discover pages.View the full article

Several months ago, back in March, Google added a screen to request reviews by sharing a link or QR code with your customers. Now, it seems Google has added a new help page on how to use this feature.View the full article

Google has been saying that no one uses the LLMs.txt file, that Google won't use it, that it can be useless, and you probably should noindex it if you do use it. Well, Google itself uploaded an LLMs.txt file for the Google Search Central portal.View the full article

Google Ads top combinations report now has a Top Combinations option for PMax campaigns. This report should be able to quickly show you your top performing assets including logos, headlines, descriptions, images, sitelinks, and other assets.View the full article

Google Ads is celebrating its 25th birthday/anniversary today. Yes, Google launched AdWords 25 years ago today in 2000. In 2018, Google renamed AdWords to Google Ads and the ad labels and technology have drastically changed over the years.View the full article

Google Ads is doing a limited test with some advertisers to allow them to run A/B tests with different product titles and images in Shopping Ads. Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison, said it is "currently being tested with a small number of merchants."View the full article

Can you imagine you manage hundreds of clients in your Google Ads Manager Accounts (MCC) gets hijacked. Or your Google Account and your ad campaigns gets hijacked due to an MCC hijack? Well, this stuff happens and it can be incredibly scary and painful.View the full article

Google has updated its Google Ads policies around suspensions yesterday. While no changes have been made to enforcement of these policies, Google has really updated a lot of the content, and examples provided in these policies. View the full article

Google Ads added a new channel control for Demand Gen to show ads in Google Maps. Some advertisers see the ability to select Maps as a placement in Demand Gen.View the full article