Link Building Strategies

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 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

It's been about a week since we reported on an unconfirmed Google search ranking update and well, now I am seeing multiple signs of an unconfirmed updates of sorts. I am seeing the third-party tracking tools showing volatility and I am also seeing a spike in some of the chatter within the SEO community.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

Google Ads is updating its Ads Transparency policy to specify that it will display the payment profile name as the payer name for verified advertisers, if that name differs from their verified advertiser name, starting this month.View the full article

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

Google AI Mode seems like it got a lot faster over the past day or so. Instead of going through the steps of saying thinking about this, searching for results, organizing results, it just now saying kicking off searches and then looking at sites and then quickly shows the AI Mode response.View the full article

Google has released a new help document named About Ads and AI Overviews, plus, they added a new landing page that contains a link to this single document named Ads in AI-Powered experiences. I assume Google will eventually add a new section named Ads and AI Mode in that document?View the full article

Google is testing new buttons and tags on its local listings and local ads. These include a new "read reviews" button, various appointment tags and other business descriptive tags.View the full article

Google Ads has added explanations for your performance changes directly in the charts and graphs in your Google Ads console. You can click the highlighed section of the graph to see explanations for your performance changes, like cost increases or decreases. 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 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

Jerry Dischler, the almost 20 year Google executive, is reportedly leaving Google a year and a half after he stepped down from that position. Jerry Dischler was involved in a lot of the Department of Justice negativity around Google's ad business, which may or may not be related to him stepping down in 2023 and now reportedly leaving Google in 2025.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

I am hearing reports that Google is showing driving direction request data on the Google Business Profile API for Service Area Businesses (SABs). SABs do not get a directions button, because those addresses are hidden in Google Search and Google Maps - so how does anyone trigger driving directions to that business? View the full article

Google seems to be testing showing author names and website citations in the AI Overviews. I am honestly not sure if this is new but Christian Kunz said it was and posted about it on his blog and on X.View the full article

Google announced a number of new tag, analytics and data strategies on Friday including a new Google tag gateway for advertisers. Google tag gateway for advertisers allows you to run your Google tags, be it client-side or server-side through your own website infrastructure, such as a content delivery network (CDN), load balancer, or web server.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 is testing a new sub or secondary menu under the search bar in Google Search. This secondary menu, or sub-menu, is below the main search vertical options and is missing the bubble format that we've seen Google use for this sub-menu.View the full article

I am seeing some complaints within the local SEO community about a surge or spike in name changes happening to Google Business Profiles. It is unclear how widespread the issue is, or if there is a pattern to the issue or not - at least at this point in time.View the full article

Google is testing a "recently viewed" label in the search results, next to search result snippets that you have clicked on in your recent search history. This is similar to the you visit often label and the other recently visited examples we've seen over the years.View the full article

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

Microsoft is testing shading the site names, the brand names, of retailers in the Bing Shopping search results. So the name Amazon is in a blue shaded background color as opposed to just saying Amazon.com.View the full article

Google's John Mueller explained that changing the dates in your XML Sitemaps lastmod date to all show today, the most recent day, won't favor your rankings or SEO. He said on Reddit, "setting today's date in a sitemap file isn't going to be something that works in favor of anyone, it's just lazy."View the full article