Link Building Strategies

Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison, explained why Google is only letting you add up to 100 negative keywords to your campaign-level negative keywords within your Performance Max campaigns on Google Ads.View the full article

Google's John Mueller said that when it comes to disavowing links "it's in a spammer's best interest to encourage others to spend time on it." Why? Because Google has said there is little reason to disavow links, unless you have a manual action or know you did some bad linking. View the full article

If you embed resources on your pages, those embedded resources can be cached longer than other parts of the page in Google Search. View the full article

Microsoft reported its second quarter 2025 earnings and it showed that its search and advertising revenue was up 21%. The previous quarter it was up 18%, then 19% but before than it was 12% and 8% - so things are looking more positive.View the full article

Google is testing a new ad format that overlays more product ads when you click on a "more" button. This is different from expanding a product carousel, in that this overlays on top of the current search results interface.View the full article

Google is no longer showing the price of Bitcoin when you search for it in Google Search. Google's VP, Engineering for Search, Rajan Patel, said this is "Not intended" and he will investigate the issue.View the full article

Google Ads is offering some advertisers the option to book a tagging appointment with a Google Ads representation through the Google Ads console. This will help you set up an appointment to have a Google rep help you set up proper tracking of your campaigns.View the full article

In early December, Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, said Google is starting to test powering AI Overviews with Gemini 2.0. Well, we may be starting to see some of that in the wild, with much deeper and detailed AI Overviews and citations.View the full article

John Mueller from Google wrote on Bluesky, "and let's be honest, people can tell when author bios are used purely as an SEO tactic. It's kinda awkward, not reassuring." This was in response to a post from Nikki Pilkington who said "Stop treating author bios as an SEO tactic and start treating them as what they are '" a tool for building trust with your actual human readers."View the full article

Google has a new Search Labs feature named Ask for me. Ask for me will have Google call businesses for you, to figure out the cost of the service and when it can be scheduled for you. It is like that Duplex feature we saw years ago, where Google would try to schedule a restaurant reservation for you.View the full article

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

Google AI Overviews are now able to show super detailed comparison within Google Search. If you search for two very specific models, Google may give you a ton of details directly in the AI Overview.View the full article

Microsoft seems to be testing a new related image search box in the main web search results in Bing Search. I personally cannot replicate this, which I take as a sign that this is a test.View the full article

Google Ads is testing adding a new column to its Performance Max reports named "Used Since." This column is visible on the asset level and it shows the date an asset was added.View the full article

On Thursday, January 23rd, Google updated its search quality raters guidelines PDF document. The last time Google updated this document was for the March 2024 spam update changes, over ten months ago. This update seems to focus on on spam and adds some additional details.View the full article

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

Earlier we reported that Google was testing AI-organized restaurant results in the Google Search results. Now, Google is doing the same for local events; and organizing them with AI.View the full article

Remember the Bing shopping / e-commerce cards? Well, now it looks like Bing is putting an ad slot in them and labeled them as ads.View the full article

John Mueller from Google noted that he finds it "interesting" how those who spend time in our industry "can often recognize made-for-search-engine content fairly quickly." Meaning, we are good at seeing a piece of content on the web and knowing if it was created to perform well in search or written by a normal user trying to help others.View the full article

The big Google review count bug, that we first reported on Friday and that later Google confirmed on Monday afternoon, is now being fixed. We can now see review counts climbing again and many small business owners and local SEOs are reporting improvements.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. The Google reviews bug seems to be fixed...View the full article

Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison, has confirmed that demographic exclusions will apply to Shopping inventory in Performance Max campaigns. Marvin added that the reporting on how this is shown to advertisers is still to be determined, but the goal is to let advertisers control which age groups can or cannot see the ads.View the full article

Google / Alphabet reported its Q4 2024 earnings last night, where its ad revenue hit $72.46 billion, up 10.6% from last year's quarter of $65.52 billion. Google's revenue was up 12% with $96.47 billion and its profit was up 30.7% to $30.9B. Search revenue specifically was up 12.5% to $54 billion.View the full article

Google announced three updates to its image and assets system including its generative AI can now generate people and faces. Google also announced asset audience recommendations and asset testing for feed-only Performance Max campigns.View the full article

Google has added a method to bulk manage the special hours for all the businesses you manage in Google Business Profiles. You can easily copy special hours from one business listing to others.View the full article