Link Building Strategies

Google has published a new help document titled About the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) and UCP-powered checkout feature on Google. This was published in the Google Merchant Center help documentation section.View the full article

Imagine you own a restaurant and you get all your reservations online through your booking system; you even tell people to book online when they call, via an automated message. But then, all of a sudden, Google decides to hijack that booking link and replace it with Google Assistant's calling feature.View the full article

Google posted a new job listing looking to hire a new Senior Software Engineer, Search, AI Answers Quality. The job post says "Help the AI Answers Quality team deliver AI Overviews to users' hard and complicated queries on the SRP and in AI Mode."View the full article

Google is looking to hire a software engineer with the responsibility of improving the quality of User Generated Content (UGC) contents in Google Discover.View the full article

Google is hiring a Chief of Staff on Search Intelligence, Strategy and Operations. This job is to "help architect the next era of Search with AI," Rajan Patel, the Vice President of Search Engineering of Google, posted on LinkedIn.View the full article

Google may have hit those self-promotional and self-serving listicle articles in one of the more recent unconfirmed Google search ranking updates. Lily Ray dug into a pattern she spotted with these types of pieces of content, mostly in the SaaS space, being hit hard with the January Google updates.View the full article

Google announced that it will be reinstating the suspended hotels in Hotel Center and removing the Suspended Hotels" tab in the "Properties" page of your Hotel Center account.View the full article

Google seems to have a bug that prevents searchers from leaving hotel reviews directly in the Google Search desktop interface. It works fine within Google Maps and Hotel search interfaces but not in the web search interface.View the full article

Google is testing a new box that highlights that you can book the hotel at the official site, the hotel's direct website. This does not look like a sponsored result, but just a way to highlight the official website of the hotel.View the full article

Google Search seems to be super volatile today and yesterday, so I will call this the Google I/O 2025 Google unconfirmed update. I am seeing a spike in chatter within the SEO community along with many of the tools showing super heated volatility within the Google search results.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

Google is testing showing normal search ads in an ad carousel at the top of the image search results on mobile. The ads take up a lot of the top real estate of the image results and can be scrolled from side to side.View the full article

Google's Robby Stein reiterated that Google's AI experience, such as AI Mode and AI Overviews, integrates Google's core search signals. This helps Google provide more useful and helpful responses to users in the AI experiences. But it doesn't always get it right, as many of you know.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 is reportedly working on a new Gemini App user experience, which it is calling 2.0. The company is putting "huge investment" into this update of the Gemini user experience but we are not sure when this new look and experience will be released.View the full article

A year or more ago, Google added a toggle switch to use Gemini directly in the iOS Google Search app. Well, that was removed this week and you now need to go to the native Gemini app to use Gemini, you cannot use the Google app.View the full article

Google is appealing the ruling that it is an illegal search monopoly - which surprises no one. Plus, Google asked the court to pause the remedies during the appeal phase.View the full article

Google is losing one of its main sources of information for its Knowledge Graph, the CIA World Factbook. This was a reference resource produced by the Central Intelligence Agency between 1962 and 2026 with almanac-style information about the countries of the world.View the full article

Google's John Mueller confirmed that Google is not killing off all forms of schema and structured data support for Google Search. The question came up in a Reddit thread after Google's announcement about more structured data support and search features going away.View the full article

Google updated its JavaScript SEO documentation for the third time this week, this time to say that "while pages with a 200 HTTP status code are sent to rendering, this might not be the case for pages with a non-200 HTTP status code."View the full article

Google has been using AI to write parts of the knowledge panels for some time now. But now it seems, when Google does that, it will show references and link cards, like it does in the AI Overviews.View the full article

Google is testing a knowledge panel that includes a places card that can be expanded to show a map and local pack results. I cannot replicate this, which makes me think this is a test. I do see the places section below the knowledge panel, but not one that you can click to expand.View the full article

Google seems to be rolling out colorful sections in the knowledge panels. Sometimes you will see gray, sometimes blue, sometimes orange and sometimes green and maybe more. We saw this on mobile over a decade ago, so this does seem new, especially on desktop.View the full article

Back in May, we covered how Google was testing a new sponsored results label that placed a few ads beneath it, as opposed to labeling each and every ad as sponsored. Well, that version seems to be expanding and more and more people are seeing it and many are not liking it.View the full article

A new agency-dedicated experience Merchant Center experience from Google should streamline managementView the full article