Link Building Strategies

Google Search may be pushing out another search ranking update of sorts, I am seeing more signs of tremors and volatility over the past 24-hours. Some of the tools are already picking up on it but the SEO community is noticing some big movement starting on Monday, May 12th and into today, Tuesday, May 13th.View the full article

Earlier this month, Google updated its Ads Transparency policy to specify that it will display the payment profile name as the payer name for verified advertisers. Well, now we are starting to see a new section that says "Ads funded by" on the "My Ad Center" section of the search ads.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 confirmed ads with AI Overviews make as much as ads without AI Overviews on the page...View the full article

Google has confirmed that AI Mode reporting will be coming to Google Search Console. It is currently not yet in Search Console, but it will be coming as part of the AI Mode rollout. 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 confirmed there is a bug with the referrer links in AI Mode...View the full article

Google is showing the number of followers for a Facebook profile in the Google Ads, the search ads. We saw Google testing this for organic / free results two years ago, but now we see them being tested on sponsored search listings.View the full article

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

Remember the Power Pair from Google Marketing Live 2024? Well, that and several other items of discussion were found in internal emails at Google about the GML 2024 event. It discussed how advertisers were not excited about PMax, there is frustration amongst advertisers, being pushed into fully automated ads and they are just willing to go along with it.View the full article

Robby Stein, VP of Product at Google Search, confirmed Google is working on making it easier to share AI Overviews within Google Search and AI Mode responses.View the full article

Google's John Mueller once again told SEOs to stop using the Google Indexing API for unsupported content types. The Google Indexing API is supported for job postings and live stream content and nothing else, but yet many still try to use it for other types of content.View the full article

Google is rolling out device targeting controls and features within Google Ads Performance Max campaigns. We knew this was coming and now it seems to be rolling out to some (not all) advertisers. This allows you to target based on device type, such as computers, mobile phones, tablets and/or TV screens.View the full article

Navah Hopkins, someone I have quoted here countless times, and a super respected member of the PPC community, is now the Ads Liaison for Microsoft Advertising. Navah wrote on LinkedIn, "I could not be more excited to announce I am joining Microsoft Advertising as the Ads Liaison!"View the full article

I will start off by saying, I am super confused by this Google Ads email but it says Google is "Improving offline conversion quality in Smart and PMax Campaigns with Store Goals." Starting on February 28, 2025 Google will "increase focus on locally engaged users on channels with higher local intent."View the full article

The details from the DOJ and Google monopoly case hearing exhibits just keep on flowing and with that, we have another mention of how Google does look at clicks from the search results. This one talks about how the position of the link can be a bias towards the number of clicks that result gets, so Google had to develop an adjustment of sorts to counter that bias.View the full article

Google updated its Google Merchant Center merchant listing structured data documentation to removed the EnergyConsumptionDetails properties and added an alternative solution to the certificationIdentification property. But keep in mind that the hasEnergyConsumptionDetails is backwards compatible for those who have already implemented it.View the full article

We've only covered the Department of Justice vs Google documents here and there but here are some documents that may be of interest to the community here. Google said Navboost is not a machine learning system, instead it is more of a big table. And there are more documents including one on hand crafting signals and another on a debugging interface.View the full article

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

This week, we covered some more Google Search ranking volatility, post-core update. I also posted some polls on the Google March 2025 core update. Google said they do not have a brand ranking system. Google is ranking AI-translated Reddit results...View the full article

Microsoft is testing a new layout in Bing for the people also ask section. Instead of the carousel card format, Bing is testing more of a list view with the ability to expand the details.View the full article

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

Google is testing a new label or green text on its shopping ads to tell you when the price of that item is low. The label says "Lowest in 30 days," which says the price is the lowest it has been in the past month.View the full article

Google has confirmed that the volatility we all saw prior to the official announcement of the Google March 2025 Core Update was not related to the March 2025 Core Update. This is something we expected Google to confirm, as I've asked Google this question numerous times and got the same answer each and every time.View the full article

Microsoft is testing putting a shopping bag icon on its "Shop Now" Bing Ads layout. I cannot replicate this but normally Bing shows a button that says "Shop Now" and that is it, but in this test, Bing is adding a bag icon before the "Shop Now" text.View the full article

Google is also testing a new pagination bar with page numbers and previous and next icons, instead of the "more search results" button. Bing was recently just testing this too and now I see Google testing it.View the full article

Google said it is now able to catch "20-times the number of scammy pages," that it did in the past, leading to a reduction of "these scams by more than 80% in Search." Google credits investments in AI-powered scam detection systems and improved scam classifiers. View the full article