Link Building Strategies

Google Business Profiles support team is currently a bit delayed, with a backlog of support requests, video verification delays, and reinstatement request backlogs. View the full article

Google has upgraded the emails Google Business Profiles sends when your verification has failed. It now shows the reason(s) a verification has failed and what you need to do to become verified in Google Business Profiles.View the full article

Google has updated the Google Business Profiles verification issues support form. This makes it easier to pick a specific issue you had when trying to verify a business within Google Business Profiles.View the full article

Google's Lisa Landsman interviewed Google's Google Business Profiles Verification Product Manager, Sheerna. They discussed a lot of the concerns many local SEOs and small businesses are dealing with around GBPs and also the challenges they have with managing the service.View the full article

Google has added video previews to the video verification within Google Business Profiles. Google's Lisa Landsman said this will help with "submitting, ensuring clarity and accuracy '" saving you valuable time and reducing the need for resubmissions."View the full article

Google is rolling out a new feature for Google Business Profiles named What's Happening. This feature is for bars or restaurants to better promote events, deals, and specials prominently at the top of their Google Business Profile.View the full article

Google has expanded access to the Google Business Profiles' what's happening feature to multi-location restaurants and bars in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. When it launched in May it was only available for single-location restaurants.View the full article

We've seen at least two variations of Google local and Business Profiles showing related to your search boxes, but this new one looks a bit more tidy than the Q&A carousel and Google Posts carousel version.View the full article

Google Business Profile edits may have a bug or some sort of glitch. A number of local SEOs are reporting seeing the message, "Your edit was not approved" when trying to make simple edits to Business Profiles.View the full article

Google now supports expressive reactions for Google reviews on mobile search and maps. This shows up when viewing a Google Business Profile's reviews on mobile.View the full article

Google will stop showing the business short names on Google Business Profiles in Search and Google Maps. The short name will still work, if you have one, but going forward, the link in your Google Business Profile will no longer be displayed to you or searchers.View the full article

Google is testing swapping out the Gemini button at the top right of the Chrome browser, with a "Browse with AI" button. The button is more colorful and in your face, which probably gets more users to notice it.View the full article

Google has just given up on a third-party cookie alternative. Google announced it will maintain its "current approach to offering users third-party cookie choice in Chrome, and will not be rolling out a new standalone prompt for third-party cookies."View the full article

Google announced updates to Circle to Search where it now doesn't just look at the part you circles but apparently the whole image, so it can get more context. "New multi-object image search helps you find more items from one picture at the same time in Circle to Search," Google explained.View the full article

Google has updated its Manage customer reviews help documentation to expand and clarify the "Understand what happens to your replies" section. It now specifies why a business reply to a review may be hold, how long it takes and more.View the full article

Earlier this month, we reported that Google updated two of its help documents around Google's crawler file size limits. Well, Google made a clarification to one of those documents the other day after some confusion within the SEO industry.View the full article

Google has updated the review snippet documentation to explain that site owners should avoid using multiple ways of indicating what's being reviewed, the search company announced. This is to make it clear about how nesting in reviews and aggregate ratings are interpreted and handled by Google Search.View the full article

Google has reportedly confirmed that the Google Discover feed has recently increased how often it shows social media posts in the feed. We covered this in January, and while we know Google does show social media in the Discover feed, it seems Google is more likely to show these social media posts more often now.View the full article

Google has confirmed a Google Search serving issue that is currently ongoing and impacting serving "some pages in some locales." This is a large enough issue that Google posted about it on its Google Search Status Dashboard. View the full article

On Friday, we reported that the Google local reviews seem to be disappearing or being counted wrong. Well, Google finally confirmed the issue, just minutes ago, in the Google Business Profiles Forums.View the full article

We covered Google testing using AI to generate snippet summaries and snippet descriptions, but all of those had a Gemini logo next to them, as to label them AI-generated. Now, Google was caught not showing the AI-label on these AI-generated descriptions in the search results.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

Google is testing placing the search results in the center of the screen, instead of aligning it more to the left of the screen. This is an ongoing test we have seen on and off over many many years and it is still going on.View the full article

Some sites, hosted on some CDNs (content delivery networks), are experiencing a big spike in server response times for crawling, while seeing a drop in total crawl requests. So technically, the crawling has dropped but Google is taking much longer to crawl a lot less.View the full article

Google is testing a new AI Search based option codenamed Darksteel. This reminds me of when we caught Google testing 47 different AI Search options back in March but Darksteel was not one of them.View the full article