Link Building Strategies

A new study from Columbia Journalism Review showed that AI search engines and chatbots, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, Deepseek Search, Microsoft Copilot, Grok and Google's Gemini, are just wrong, way too often. I have said this time and time again, when I see an AI Answer, at this point, I just skip over it because I know I cannot trust it and this proves that.View the full article

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

Google can now show the "price at checkout" within the Google Shopping listings, both paid and organic. I am not sure if this is new, being that Google has had policies about suspending merchants who change their pricing at checkout and even allows Googlebot to add items to the cart for this reason.View the full article

Google has made a number of updates to its Merchant Center product data specifications, including some that went into effect on April 8th and some that will go into effect on July 1, 2025.View the full article

Microsoft is testing a double border style around the Bing Search box. This goes around the main search box but not the auto-complete box, I believe.View the full article

Google has a new search refinement or expansion feature they are titling "Relevant topics." This reminds me of People also ask, Things to do, and the other ways Google tries to get you to search more after conducting your first search.View the full article

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

Danny Sullivan, Google's Search Liaison, said it again, that Google does not have a system to recognize if a site is run by a big brand and then automatically just ranks it higher. He said on X, "but no, we don't have a brand-ranking system."View the full article

Google's VP of Product at Google Search, Robby Stein, has responded to concerns from publishers around the new AI Mode. Specifically, the concerns around this new AI search interface not being all that encouraging for users to click over to publishers' sites.View the full article

Google is testing adding a disclaimer or piece of text on the AI Overviews within the desktop and mobile search results that says "Check important info." I guess this is Google being a bit more cautious about some AI Overviews?View the full article

Well, it seems to be official now. Starting April 14, 2025 Google will update its Unfair advantage policy to say it is allowed to show the same ad, from the same company, going to the same page, as long as the ad is in a different ad location. Google was just experimenting with this earlier and now it is officially going to be allowed.View the full article

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

The folks at Google did a live demo of Android XR, Google's AR glasses with Gemini, at the TED 2025 event. It is pretty wild to watch this demo, so I figured I'd share it with all of you here, in case you missed it.View the full article

CNBC reports Google has been sued in the UK for <<£5 billion ($6.6 billion) in potential damages over allegations that the U.S. tech giant abused its "near-total dominance" in the online search market to drive up prices.View the full article

Google has sent out an email to its Google Local Service Ads advertisers, notifying them that they are now letting searchers use a booking link to schedule an appointment or service, when the booking link is detected on the Google Business Profile of that business.View the full article

Google uses its search engine data and signals to help train its Gemini AI models, we learned from documents from the DOJ deposition testimony. Although, we kind of knew that when Google launched SGE, they told us they used Google Search's core ranking systems to help identify high-quality sites (although, it didn't seem like they did...).View the full article

After initially going live on Wednesday morning, Microsoft did not officially announce the launch of Copilot Search in Bing until late Friday afternoon. Microsoft said, "Copilot Search seamlessly blends the best of traditional and generative search together to help you find what you need '" and meet you where you're at in your discovery journey."View the full article

Last November, Google began using AI to generate review summaries in Google Maps. Well, now they seem to be showing up in the local knowledge panels on the right side of the Google Search results page.View the full article

Google has shut down, turned off, and disabled, its new page annotations feature. The feature where Google hijacked your content, placed links in your content, links you didn't add yourself, and directed your content to Google Search. It is no longer, Google shut it down. View the full article

Google may be bringing channel reporting to the Google Ads Performance Max campaigns. I spotted this via Kirk Williams who posted a photo of a slide from Google Think event in Amsterdam where Arjan Schoorl attended. The slide says "Channel Reporting" will be coming to PMax and Demand Gen for increased transparency and controls.View the full article

Google Search seems to have accidentally leaked its various AI Search options and features, that go beyond just AI Mode, which it recently launched. 47 different AI Search options are shown including Info Sleuth, Allium, QTalk, MedExplainer, Fantasy Sports Researcher, Smart Kitchen and many more.View the full article

19 months ago, Google released a feature named SGE while browsing, and later changed it to AI while browsing. Well, that feature is no longer - Google has deprecated it and put it in the Google graveyard.View the full article

I don't know if you might also like this, you probably won't but Bing is dropped ads in their featured answers, featured snippets. They are calling these ads "You might also like."View the full article

For some Google searchers the ability to go to page two of the search results is simply not possible. The classic Google pagination bar is missing at the bottom of the results for some searchers.View the full article

Google made a really small change to its spam policies documentation to say, "In the context of Google Search, spam refers to techniques used to deceive users or manipulate our Search systems into ranking content highly."View the full article