Link Building Strategies

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

It's been almost two weeks since I last reported on a Google Search ranking update (unconfirmed) and that may be a recent record. But that being said, I am now seeing some signs of another unconfirmed Google update. The tools are starting to spike, and I am seeing some limited chatter within the SEO community.View the full article

Google announced a couple new Google Lens features; (1) they are expanding how AI Overviews show on Google Lens results and (2) Chrome and Google's iOS app now let you search your screen with Google Lens.View the full article

Google Business Profiles now can add backgrounds to the images you upload to your Google Posts, using AI. Victoria Kroll from Google wrote that you can now "can create an engaging AI-generated background for the photos you plan to use in the post."View the full article

Google announced three updates to its image and assets system including its generative AI can now generate people and faces. Google also announced asset audience recommendations and asset testing for feed-only Performance Max campigns.View the full article

Google is showing AI-generated review summaries on some top quality store pages. So when you click on a specific retailer or merchant's top quality store link, at the top of the reviews you may see an AI-generated summary of those reviews.View the full article

Martin Split from Google said that having an audio version of a page or a blog post, does not impact your Google rankings. He said it is good for your users, but has no SEO impact.View the full article

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

The first week of January, we reported on an interesting local update we named the January 2025 local search update. Well, this might be more of a diversity update, where Google removes the URL for the core organic results, when that URL is also present in the local pack results. View the full article

If you try to access your Google Business Profile page right now, you likely won't be able to. It seems Google Business Profile edit section within Google Search is broken and serves a 500 error when you try to do anything.View the full article

Google Business Profiles support team is currently a bit delayed, with a backlog of support requests, video verification delays, and reinstatement request backlogs. View the full article

We know Google can show reviews from third-party sources in Google Business Profile listings. We've seen Google take reviews from Yelp, travel sites and other third-party websites. But these days, more often than not, you see reviews only from Google. But have you ever seen a review from Yandex on Google?View the full article

Google is testing a new design for its search results that are more of a grid format, more of a boxed in design. They are not on all the search results elements but more of the search features.View the full article

Google has this feature in its search results that lets you find results based on the images you've view within Google Image Search. It places this button in the search results that reads, "Find results based on images you've viewed" with a link to "more like these."View the full article

Google is testing spelling out the search menu and instead of saying "All," Google is testing writing out "All results." I am not sure why Google is testing this, but Google is always testing these small changes.View the full article

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

Google's John Mueller said that there is no persistent shortcut to faster crawling. Yes, you can expedite crawling for specific situations and times, but there is no way to just tell Google you want them to crawl you faster, all the time.View the full article

Google Search is testing a new section in the search results titled or named "Background." This includes articles from news publishers, with I guess, more background information than you would find from others.View the full article

Google Ads has this section (not sure if it is new) named Advanced Plans. This feature allows you to select a "mix of ad types based on goals" and Google will create conversion creation and capture plans for you.View the full article

Microsoft is testing adding a new box to the knowledge panels within Bing that show related searches. This is obviously to encourage searches to do more queries, to generate more ads and more revenue. Or maybe to help searchers find a more diverse set of topics to search for.View the full article

Google is testing removing the numbers from the pagination menu at the footer of the Google Search results page. The normal pagination bar shows the page number you are on, the test just shows a next button.View the full article

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

Dwarkesh Patel interviewed Jeff Dean and Noam Shazeer of Google and one topic he asked about what would it be like to merge or combine Google Search with in-context learning. It resulted in a fascinating answer from Jeff Dean.View the full article

Google has upgraded the emails Google Business Profiles sends when your verification has failed. It now shows the reason(s) a verification has failed and what you need to do to become verified in Google Business Profiles.View the full article

Google Merchant Center recently began showing AI-generated summaries for how well your performance is doing with Merchant Center in Google Search. These are labeled as "experimental" and "AI-generated."View the full article