Link Building Strategies

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

This week...View the full article

The Google Search team and the Google Ads team released two different videos this week that I thought you should all listen to, at least in the background. In short, Martin Splitt and Gary Illyes from the Google Search team spoke about how browsers parse HTML. Ginny Marvin and Ads UI Product Manager Abby Butler and Search Ads UX Lead Adam Bullock spoke about search experiences with search ads.View the full article

Microsoft Advertising has now rolled out the self-serve negative keyword lists. This launched a couple of days ago and was announced by Navah Hopkins, the Microsoft Ads Liaison.View the full article

Google Ads is rolling out text guidelines for all advertisers globally in AI Max. We thought the rollout started more broadly last October, after it was announced last September, but now it is really fully rolling out.View the full article

Google is testing adding "web mentions" to the retailer store page under the reviews section. I cannot replicate this yet, but web mentions shows what people are saying about the retailer on sites like Reddit and other social platforms, whereas reviews are reviews left on Google.View the full article

Microsoft Bing Search is testing a new layout for videos within the search results. Instead of a list view, Bing is testing a two-by-two grid layout.View the full article

Google's February 2026 Google Discover Core Update has officially completed rolling out after just over 3 weeks. This update started on February 5, 2026, and was completed on February 27, 2026.View the full article

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

Google announced updates to Circle to Search where it now doesn't just look at the part you circles but apparently the whole image, so it can get more context. "New multi-object image search helps you find more items from one picture at the same time in Circle to Search," Google explained.View the full article

Google has released a minor version update to the Google Ads API, version 23.1. This update has changes to account management, campaigns, conversions, incentives, planning, reporting and more.View the full article

Microsoft has updated the design of the Bing Webmaster Guidelines section and changed some of the verbiage. I think overall these are smaller updates, but I have not gone through every single change to double-check as of yet.View the full article

Reuters has a headline that reads Exclusive: Google to test changes to search results, source says as EU fine looms. This confuses me because I thought Google had been testing this for a couple of years now. View the full article

Recently, Google rolled out the ability to schedule Google Posts. Supposedly, soon, Google will also roll out recurring scheduling for posts. So you can set a Google Post to repeat and post over and over again on a schedule.View the full article

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

Some time ago, Google updated the flow for the Google Business Profile verification. And the issue is, if you fill it out wrong, it can have consequences for that Google business listing in the future.View the full article

Google is showing a "See more" button in some of the AI Mode results. This has been happening for almost the past month on desktop and probably mobile. It seems to come up more often for shopping related results, to load more products from the Google Shopping Graph.View the full article

Anthropic updates its crawler documentation explaining what its crawlers do, and what blocking them will result in. Anthropic has three primary bots and they include ClaudeBot, Claude-User and Claude-SearchBot.View the full article

Google's AI Shopping tab is now pushing shoppers and searchers to find more products. The prompt responses to your queries can display "Show more products" and other links to get you to view more products.View the full article

Google had a brief issue with serving search results this morning, February 25th. Google documented the issue at around 1:30 am ET on Wednesday, February 25th and said it was resolved a minute later.View the full article

Google is losing one of its main sources of information for its Knowledge Graph, the CIA World Factbook. This was a reference resource produced by the Central Intelligence Agency between 1962 and 2026 with almanac-style information about the countries of the world.View the full article

Google Ads may be automatically enabling paused keywords in your advertising accounts. I am waiting for a statement from Google on this but there are reports that this is being done through the low activity system bulk changes.View the full article

Google Ads is now showing in the "When and where ads showed" report, the ability to see PMax, Performance Max, reporting. So you can see the placement, type, network and impressions you are getting from your PMax campaigns.View the full article

Earlier this month, we covered Google testing what we called contextual overlay link cards in AI Overviews and AI Mode. Well, Google officially began rolling them out yesterday, and they are more like hover-over pop-up link cards.View the full article

There is a bug impacting a number of Google AdSense publishers where the anchor and vignette ads won't close for users. This has been an issue since February 13th and Google is reportedly working on a fix for the issue.View the full article