Link Building Strategies

Google released AI Mode in the U.S. a couple of days ago and Tom Critchlow and Patrick Stox noticed that Google prevented you from tracking referrer data from AI Mode. Well, that turned out to be unintentional and Google said it is a bug and it will be fixed.View the full article

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

Another week and more Google search ranking volatility hit mid-week, did you notice? Google's crawler might be causing issues on your site this week. Google still is making its crawling more efficient and better. Google Search Console's API had delayed this week. Google was sued over AI Overviews...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 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

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

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

Google had a lot of news out of Google I/O, as you would expect. The big item, which we predicted, was that AI Mode is now available to all US searchers without having to opt into it within Search Labs. Plus, Google is testing a number of new features in AI mode including Deep Search, Live Search, personal context, custom charts, AI shopping and yes - Agentic features.View the full article

Since Google began rolling out AI Overviews in Google Search, publishers, site owners, SEOs, etc have been posting screenshots of their Google Search Console performance reports that show how clicks from Google start to drop, where impressions stay the same or go higher.View the full article

Google is now testing summarizing the stories listed on Google Discover with generative AI. Some are calling this adding AI Overviews to Google Discover, which I guess is about the same thing. Of course, publishers may be worried that these AI summaries will reduce clicks from Google Discover.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 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 going to do away with the Bing Search and Bing Custom Search APIs as of August 11, 2025. Microsoft posted a notice on its API documentation pages with this news.View the full article

Google is testing showing the vertical search category a query belongs to in its autocomplete search suggestions. When you click into the Google Search box, even before you begin typing your query, Google shows search suggestions and some of those search suggestions have a label that says "short videos," "images," etc.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

We generally see the AI Overviews show at the top of the Google search results page, I mean, it is an overview, so you'd expect them at the top. But we've seen them show up in the middle of the search results, sometimes even in position two. Now we are seeing examples of them showing at the botton of the search results page.View the full article

You may remember the page includes search result snippet in Google Search. Well, now Google is testing making those clickable links that go to more search results.View the full article

We know Google will be bringing Google Discover to the desktop interface, heck, we've seen Google testing it for a while now. But did you know that Google will also show the breakdown of mobile versus desktop performance of Google Discover in Google Search Console?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

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

Google is testing replacing the "Dive deeper in AI Mode" button with "Follow up in AI Mode." This is the button you can sometimes see at the bottom of the AI Overview, after you expand the AI Overview within Google Search.View the full article

Google Ads, sometime after June 2024 and November 2024, updated the size of your data segment requirement from 1,000 active visitors in a 30-day period to 100 active visitors in the same period. This is for the requirement to serve your ads varies based on the target network, specific to the Google Search Network.View the full article

Google was ruled, for the second time, an illegal monopoly again by a Federal Judge yesterday. And another week and more heated volatility in the Google Search results. Google also announced they will redirect...View the full article

This week was a huge week for search; between Google I/O and Google Marketing Live - it was just a lot. We had two unconfirmed Google ranking updates, one on I/O day and one on May 16th. Google announced AI Mode was...View the full article