Link Building Strategies

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

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

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

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

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'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

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

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

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

Google's Robby Stein confirmed (again) that Google is personalizing some of the AI experiences, including AI Overviews and AI Mode. He said this on the CNN, Terms of Service podcast with Clare Duffy.View the full article

Navah Hopkins, the Microsoft Ads Liaison, posted a reminder on LinkedIn, encouraging advertisers to ensure the email settings are all configured properly. You can get monthly invoices, billing alerts, account notifications, ad and keyword rejection notices, optimization and performance tips and more.View the full article

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

Microsoft is hiring a "very" Senior Product Manager who will initially work on fighting spam across Bing and Copilot. Fabrice Canel said this is a "very" senior PM role and the job description says the "initial focus on reducing Spam in Copilot, Bing, MSN and Ads."View the full article

Greg Gifford, a veteran automotive and local SEO, published a hard warning to vendors suggesting that they tell automotive dealerships to set up separate Google Business Profile department listings for separate services. He said, do not, do not, do this and that it can lead to your Google Business Profiles being suspended and removed from Google Search and Google Maps.View the full article

John Mueller, a Google Search Analyst, responded to a question on Reddit named Is SEO still enough, or do we need to start thinking about GEO too? In short, John said you should look at the "full picture, and prioritize accordingly."View the full article

Adam Wathan the creator of Tailwind CSS posted that he had to let go of 75% of his engineering team because of AI. He said traffic to the Tailwind help documentation is down 40% and that is where most people learn about his solution and then buy commercial products. He added his revenue is down 80%.View the full article

Google seems to be testing showing call assets on Vehicle Ads within Google Search. So on the Vehicle Ads there is a way to call the dealer or seller, like you see on some other ads.View the full article

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

There are a number of SEOs and site owners complaining that they saw a large drop in Google Search rankings yesterday, January 6, 2026. This unconfirmed Google update does not feel as widespread as some of the previous ones we reported on but I wanted to document this one as such, just in case some of you are impacted.View the full article

Google will update how it handles multi-channel products, products sold both online and locally in the store, to help with managing inventory. Google emailed merchants that this applies to and the changes go into effect this March.View the full article

Microsoft is testing a much larger "Ask Copilot" button on the Bing home page. Normally, Bing only has a small Copilot logo on the right of the search box but in this test, Bing writes it all out - "Ask Copilot" with the logo.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 Discover seems to show X posts way too often and some searchers don't like it...View the full article

Last November, Google announced it was dropping support for a number of structured data types and search features. One of those was practice problem structured data types, and now, Google has removed the help documentation along with it.View the full article

Google Ads will update its advertising policies to allow ads for Prediction Markets starting on January 21, 2026. This will be allowed in the United States, but only for federally regulated entities.View the full article

Microsoft Bing is testing a new home page design where it promotes its AI-powered search and answer engine, Copilot. It seems to be a limited test and is not fully live yet, but it is a big change to the home page, which normally has the Bing custom background, search box, and the news feed below.View the full article