Link Building Strategies

Google's John Mueller said that implementing hotlink protections with carve-outs for search engines are fine. He added that this is not really a thing sites do that much these days, stating it was a thing in 2010's or so but not now.View the full article

Google AdSense will remove the ability to block the video games category of ads. So if you previously told AdSense not to show ads related to video games on your site or in your apps, that block will soon not be respected.View the full article

Google seems to be rolling out a new metric in the Google Business Profiles performance report for "messaging clicks." This was a feature we had in the old Google My Business reports in 2020 but it went away. But now it seems to be returning.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 needs even more queries, the 10% growth isn't enough, so Google AI Overviews is testing query expansion tabs at the top of the AI Overviews. We've seen variations of this within the AI Overviews, but now they are testing them at the top of the AI Overviews.View the full article

Google Ads has updated the number of characters you can add for the Performance Max campaigns descriptions to all be 90 characters long. Previously, there was a short description of 60 characters, but now they have all been updated to show 90 characters.View the full article

Google announced a number of new goals and image controls that are now available on Google Ads Performance Max campaigns. Google added customer lifecycle goals and reporting and additional image controls.View the full article

Google seems to be testing linking the "Reviews" button you see in the local panel, on a Google Business Profile, to AI Overviews. So when you search for a business, see the local panel on the right side, and then click on "reviews," you are taken to an AI Overview result.View the full article

Google said it again - structured data does not help your site rank any better. John Mueller of Google said this on Bluesky, "Structured data won't make your site rank better." He said, all it is "used for displaying the search features listed in" this search gallery document.View the full article

Google is testing a newish section in the Google local panel to tell searchers how far that business is from your location. Google is testing adding either a "Get there" data point and/or a "From your location" data point. View the full article

Microsoft has opened access to the Copilot feature within Bing Webmaster Tools. I played a lot with it when I was in the limited beta in December and it is a cool nifty feature to use, but I am not sure how critical of a feature it is.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

Google recently said it made Search "much faster," at least that is what Rajan Patel, the VP of Engineering at Google Search said on social. There is a larger blog post that Google wrote up on this, which I initially decided not to cover but I changed my mind.View the full article

Google's Lisa Landsman interviewed Google's Google Business Profiles Verification Product Manager, Sheerna. They discussed a lot of the concerns many local SEOs and small businesses are dealing with around GBPs and also the challenges they have with managing the service.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 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 released its much anticipated AI Mode, which is in beta now, but it super cool. Google AI Overviews are now powered by Gemini 2.0. Google had more search ranking volatility this week. Google said they answered...View the full article

Google announced a number of AI-related features to help advertisers create and manage their ads account across Google Ads and Merchant Center. These include new AI tools for creating ads and creatives and also agentic capabilities to help you with this on the backend.View the full article

Google Search Console's Discover performance report has a weird bug. It started early yesterday morning where a blue notice prompt would show up and have a mysterious hashtag, with the text "Learn more" and "Got it." This is obviously a bug.View the full article

Google Search is testing a new expandable carousel that says "more from" a specific retailer. When it loads, it loads more products in a carousel beneath the search result snippet from that retailer.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

Back in February, I reported about this unusual Google Search ad format for people also considered sponsored results. They did not look like ads, but they were labeled sponsored. Ginny Marvin, Google's Ads Liaison, confirmed these are a sponsored ads experiment, but clicking on them do not result in a charge. They are labeled as sponsored only because they go to more commercial queries.View the full article

Microsoft Bing announced some interesting updates for IndexNow including how it works now with product schema and that Shopify now supports it and soon Amazon will. This will help Bing and search engines that use IndexNow have more accurate and up-to-date products for their shopping results and shopping ads.View the full article

Google Business Profiles has another bug, this time with the toggle to hide or show the business address. The toggle for "Show business address to customers" just does not work - I even tried it myself and it is not working for my business.View the full article

Google has added a new display ads option for ad intents. The new option lets you pick between always show display ads with organic search results or show search ads with organic search results, and display ads if search ads are unavailable.View the full article