Link Building Strategies

As a reminder, the Google March 2025 core update touched down on March 13th, and as Google said, not before. And while many sites were hit super hard in the early days, the net of this update didn't seem as wide as other core updates. Now, I am seeing the third-party tracking tools explode this morning - but is it a tool issue or real core update volatility being detected?View the full article

On Friday, Google published its findings from its experiment of removing some EU news publishers from its search results. The results said that Google had no visible loss of search ad revenue when the news publishers were removed.View the full article

Surprise, surprise, as I called it, Google is expanding AI Overviews into more regions. I mean, we saw this being leaked a couple of weeks ago, so it is not shocking news. But at I/O, Google said AI Overviews are "now available in more than 200 countries and territories and in more than 40 languages, with support added for Arabic, Chinese, Malay, Urdu and more."View the full article

Google is testing removing the site names from the search result snippets and just showing the site's URL at the top - title link - position of the snippet. 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 Search Console may be rolling out desktop versus mobile Discover performance data...View the full article

Google added a number of new features to the event rich results search feature within Google Search. Some of these might not be new, but now on these event results you can share the event, add it to your calendar, see similar events, get more details on the venue and find nearby food and drinks.View the full article

Google's John Mueller explained that just because you use hreflang tags on your pages, it doesn't mean those pages will be indexed and/or ranked in Google Search. He said on Bluesky, "hreflang doesn't guarantee indexing."View the full article

It has been a couple of weeks since we last reported on a Google search ranking update, I bet a ton of you were wondering if I was feeling off. But it has been relatively calm for the past couple of weeks, that is until today. I am seeing renewed volatility over the past 24-hours and the SEO community chatter is picking up on it as well.View the full article

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

Google held another Google Creator Summit where they invited 7 creators on a fully paid expense trip to their Washington, D.C. office to spend the first two days in some larger Small Business Summit and then day three with Danny Sullivan, Paul Haahr and I believe HJ Kim from the Google Search team.View the full article

Google is testing showing a large "Sponsored results" header in the search results that can lead to more search results and grouping various Google search ads together.View the full article

Google announced a new bidding update to Google Ads named Smart Bidding Exploration. Google said this is the "biggest update to bidding in over a decade." View the full article

Fabrice Canel said Microsoft will streamline the Bing Webmaster Tools notifications because, at times, it can be a bit overwhelming. Fabrice wrote on X, "working to streamline things" when Martin MacDonald complained about getting way too many emails from Bing Webmaster Tools.View the full article

For the past few weeks or so, Google has a bug where the right side knowledge panel goes missing for business owners when you try to bring up your business listing in Google Search. This is not impacting everyone and it can be random but Google is supposedly aware of the issue and is fixing it.View the full article

Google AdSense has been testing serving and displaying ads within AI Chatbots. Bloomberg reported Google has already begun testing this within AI search apps iAsk and Liner and plans to allow other AI Chatbot providers to include AdSense ads in their chat responses.View the full article

Google is testing a "Shuffle" button in some of its AI generated answers within the Google Search results. When you click the shuffle button, it seems to redo or change up the response Google's AI gives you.View the full article

Google Ads has confirmed that it has lost some conversion data for some advertisers who used Google Merchant Center in February. The data is not coming back, it is unrecoverable. We don't know the exact dates, but Google did mention it was in February 2025.View the full article

Google released its annual metrics on how well it did with fighting spam on Google Maps. In short, Google said it blocked or removed more than 240 million policy-violating reviews, blocked or removed more than 70 million policy-violating edits, removed or blocked more than 12 million fake Business Profiles and placed posting restrictions on more than 900,000 accounts.View the full article

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

Google AI Overviews can now show an image carousel that you can swipe through to go to images. I am not able to replicate this myself but it seems like when you click on the images, it takes you into Google Image Search.View the full article

Google is sending some of its advertisers personalized emails about how they can boost their ads performance by following a few steps. The email is titled, "Your step-by-step guide to boost ads performance."View the full article

Google is reportedly going to pay $100 million to settle a 14-year-old class action case for allegedly having its Google Ads (as then known, AdWords) serve ads outside of the geographic regions the advertisers targeted.View the full article

Google may be testing replacing local pack at the top of the Google Search results for "near me" related queries with an AI Overview. So instead of showing a map and the three or so local listings, Google is showing an AI Overview with some local information.View the full article

As I covered yesterday, Google is going to redirect its ccTLDs to Google.com. And as I reported yesterday, Google also said "it won't affect the way Search works." Despite Google saying that, there are tons of people in our industry thinking that international SEO has changed with this announcement - it has not.View the full article

Google's AI crawler, Google-Extended, the crawler it uses for Gemini and other related AI services, does render itself and can render JavaScript, just like Googlebot, Google's main web search crawler.View the full article