Link Building Strategies

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 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

Google announced it has deprecated the Account level control for non personalized ads within Google AdSense's settings in privacy and messaging. Instead, Google said "use the IAB TCF framework for collecting and communicating users' consent decisions in the EEA, UK, and Switzerland."View the full article

Microsoft's Jordi Ribas announced they are partnering with creators to showcase how they use Copilot Search in Bing. Copilot Search in Bing was launched in early April, as its new AI powered search feature.View the full article

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

Since the weekend, Google has started to roll out Google Discover on desktop in many countries and regions. I personally can trigger it in Google New Zealand and some other locations but I am not yet able to trigger it on Google.com in the United States.View the full article

Google has updated its title structured data help document for Google Merchant Center to now recommend you add the product's brand name to the title of the product when it's a differentiating factor. View the full article

Google has a weird and somewhat limited and rare issue with sitemap files within Google Search Console. These sitemap files cannot be fetched and retrieved by Google Search. The issue seems to be related to 5-character subdomains that are on a Polish ccTLD, .pl.View the full article

A month ago, Google said it would soon redirect its ccTLD, country specific domains, for Google Search to its Google.com domain. So Google.de, as an example, would be redirected to Google.com. Well, that process seems to have kicked off on Friday, May 16th for some users.View the full article

Google has a bug with Google Ads where for campaigns running on New Customer Acquisition they are not able to spend the set budget. This bug was confirmed with Google and has been an issue for advertisers since May 15th.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

As I mentioned in my Friday video, there seems to be a lot of Google search ranking volatility that kicked off on Friday, May 16th and throughout this weekend. The most heated day seems to have been on Friday but the chatter is pretty busy over the weekend within the SEO community.View the full article

Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, said that search ads with AI Overviews are at a baseline, at the same level as search ads without AI Overviews, in terms of ad revenue per query. He added, and now it is just about going up from there, and with AI, he doesn't see it to a problem.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

This week, we covered, you guessed it, more Google search ranking volatility. Google also said they are rethinking its search stack from the ground up because of LLMs. Google is testing AI Overviews in more regions and languages prior to Google I/O/ Google is testing AI Mode buttons throughout Google...View the full article

Last month we shared the spam efforts the Google Maps team announced - but did you know that in 2024 Google had almost one billion reviews published within Google Maps? That is 999 million reviews, 752 million photos and videos and 94 million place edits published just in 2024.View the full article

Apple announced this week that it partnered with MICHELIN Guide; The Infatuation and Golf Digest to provide "insights, ratings, and reviews from expert sources" within Apple Maps. 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

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 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

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 is rethinking its search stack from the ground up due to LLMs...View the full article

Another Google court document from the DOJ trial showed that Google said it is currently rethinking its entire search stack, from the ground up, with LLMs playing a more fundamental role. The doc said: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

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

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