Link Building Strategies

This week, we covered more ongoing Google search ranking volatility - January was a heated month. Google AI Overviews show more button officially flows to AI Mode...View the full article

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

Welcome to the Google Webmaster report, where I sum up all the more important Google organic search topics that occurred over the past month - just in case you (or I) missed it. January was an incredibly volatile month regarding unconfirmed Google search ranking movement. I posted about it several times.View the full article

Google seems to be showing more and more ads in the local pack, aka Local Pack Ads. Just a couple of months ago, Google had ads on the local pack for less than 3% of tracked keywords; now it's up to about 22% of tracked keywords. View the full article

Google seems to be replacing its Google Ads support form with an AI agent, maybe from its Ads Advisor system. When you go to support.google.com/google-ads/gethelp you are redirected to the chat experience now. I am not sure if this is global, but I am seeing this myself across two Google Ads accounts I have access to.View the full article

John Mueller from Google dropped a very John-like hint that maybe, just maybe, Google Search Console will add AI visibility reporting. John was asked about it again and responded, saying, "While I have nothing to announce, I can say for sure that very few things online are permanent."View the full article

If you look at the source code in some of the responses OpenAI's ChatGPT gives you, you may now see references to ads. The response in the source code says, "InReply to user query using the following additional context of ads shown to the user."View the full article

As you know, January was an incredibly intense month of Google Search ranking volatility. It surprised me that Google has still not confirmed that a Google search ranking update took place. Now, John Mueller of Google was asked about it and said, "Unfortunately, I don't have any insights / updates to share."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 he would "caution against assuming that you need to do this level of analysis for all URLs on a website in order to achieve optimal SEO" when it comes to reviewing bad redirects or CSP settings. Why, because bad redirects or CSP settings are often simply visible when doing normal browsing, and if you see it, then that is enough.View the full article

Gary Illyes, along with Martin Splitt, of Google posted a podcast explaining the top crawling challenges Google noticed amongst its 2025 year of crawling. The top challenges Google had with crawling included faceted navigation, action parameters, irrelevant parameters, calendar parameters and other "weird" parameters.View the full article

OpenAI seems to be jazzing up its ChatGPT responses by showing more visual responses, like Google's knowledge panels and top stories. This goes across people, places, products, and ideas, OpenAI said.View the full article

Bing Search has rolled out what it calls multi-turn search in Bing globally. This is something we saw Microsoft Bing test back in June, when we saw a floating Copilot follow up search box at the footer of the Bing search results page show up as you scroll. It is now globally live for all to use.View the full article

Google's John Mueller said that when it comes to AI Search and the changes that come with that, Google's core search algorithms, spam detection methods, spam policies, and other search systems do not fundamentally change.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. Google says search algorithms, spam detection...View the full article

Google posted its first Winter Olympics Doodle, special logo, for the 2026 Winter Olympics. The first sport Google covered is curling. The Doodle is an animated GIF of an Olympian pushing the curling stone down the ice.View the full article

We have known for a long time that Google can crawl web pages up to the first 15MB but now Google updated some of its help documentation to clarify that it will crawl the first 64MB of a PDF file and the first 2MB of other supported file types.View the full article

Mike Ryan posted data on the percentage of invalid clicks on the Google Ad Network, broken down by fraudulent clicks or likely accidental clicks. It shows the Google Display Network has the most invalid clicks, but search partners have the most fraudulent invalid clicks.View the full article

Google's John Mueller responded to a question on the pros and cons of serving raw markdown pages to LLM crawlers and bots. John didn't say much but he did list a number of concerns and things you should be on top of, if you do go down that avenue. View the full article

We covered how horrific the AI-based Frankenstein recipes can be in Google Search, where it mashes up recipe steps from various publishers and acts like it is a real recipe from a source. Well, Bing had something similar but Jordi Ribas from Microsoft said they are "unshipping" the feature after the feedback was received. View the full article

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

Google has released its first core update of 2026, which is focused on just Google Discover. Google named it the February 2026 Discover core update. This one is rolling over the next two weeks or so just English language users in the US and at some point will roll out beyond that to all countries and languages.View the full article

To fuel the debate in the SEO world of the topic of structured data and LLMs and AI engines, we are hearing that once again, AI engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity are not using structured data in any special way. View the full article

Last week, Google updated the design for the Google Partner Portal for advertisers. Google said the new look makes it "simpler to understand your goals and to track all your points activity."View the full article

We saw Google test follow up questions below the AI Mode responses back in July. Now Google is testing follow up search suggestions, not necessarily in question format, at the bottom of some AI Mode results.View the full article