Link Building Strategies

Both Google and Microsoft reported its earnings today; Alphabet's Q3 2025 earnings and Microsoft's Q1 2026 earnings. Google reported ad revenues up by XX% with $ and Microsoft reported ad revenues up by XX%.View the full article

Microsoft Advertising advertiser web interface is down and Microsoft's Navah Hopkins said the "engineering team is investigating this issue with priority." This only impacts the web interface, according to Hopkins and ad serving does not seem to be impacted.View the full article

Microsoft is testing a way to change the country and region you are in when doing searches on Bing. There is a new country/region selector for this, similar to how Google handles it.View the full article

Google's John Mueller reminded us about when case sensitivity matters for Google Search and SEO when it comes to your URLs. In short, Google will probably figure it out based on two URLs having the same content on it but why leave it up to Google, so make sure to be consistent with your URLs so Google doesn't need to figure it out.View the full article

Google updated the Google Ads Gambling and Games policy this week to define that sweepstake casinos are not social casino games. Google said this update was added on October 28, 2025. This now prohibits sweepstake casinos from using Google Ads for advertising.View the full article

Google Merchant Center Next added new analytics data to the Promotions tab/section. This shows you two new analytics charts including "Your promotions at a glance" and "Performance in the last 28 days." These are summary cards to see how well your promotions are performing in Google Search.View the full article

About a week ago, if you searched for [disney account] and looked at the Disney search result listing in Google Search, you'd see a sitelink that reads, "Black hat SEO approaches..." And guess what, that sitelink is still live.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...View the full article

Microsoft is testing a "see more" link within the Bing Search image carousel on search result snippets. Sometimes Microsoft will show an image carousel below a search result snippet, sometimes it will show product results and sometimes it won't show at all.View the full article

Robby Stein, VP of Product for Google Search, was interviewed on the Silicon Valley Girl channel by Marina Mogilko about AI Search at Google. And one of the questions she asked was on how to show up in these Google AI responses. Robby Stein essentially said there is a lot of overlap between normal SEO for web search but the key difference are the "the kinds of questions" people ask AI versus traditional search.View the full article

Google seems to have added a download option to the Google Merchant Center promotions section. when creating promotions in Google Merchant Center, the download button will be on the bottom right of the screen.View the full article

Google may have a new chart in the Google Ads overview tab named cross campaign metrics. It seems similar to the Cross-Media Reach Measurement but this is shown in the overview tab and not in that specific report.View the full article

Robby Stein, VP of Product for Google Search, was interviewed on the Silicon Valley Girl channel by Marina Mogilko about AI Search at Google. He explained how to do SEO for AI Mode and he was crystal clear that Google Ads is not going away with the release of these new AI features.View the full article

This week, we covered more Google Search ranking volatility mid-week. Google Search Console launched query groups reports. Disney's sitelinks in Google Search seemed to have been hacked. Google reminded us about...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 says Google Ads is not going away...View the full article

Reddit announced earnings late last week and it boggles me how people love this stock. I am not a financial expert of analysis but Reddit has been saying for some time that 50% of its traffic comes from Google Search. Reddit also said on this Q3 earnings call that its search traffic is flat and that AI is not a traffic driver, at least not yet.View the full article

Raptive, an advertising-sales company representing thousands of websites (content publishers), filed a 93-page complaint against Google in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The suit says "Google has carried out a sophisticated, anticompetitive, and deceptive scheme for well over a decade" by "manipulating auctions for ad space across the Internet."View the full article

Google's John Mueller posted a PSA yesterday, reminding SEOs and developers to verify the host name of cloud providers they are using to host images, videos, and other content. Specifically, you should use a DNS CNAME to the bucket, then verify with DNS with Search Console.View the full article

A few weeks ago, Google launched a new ad layout with the large "Sponsored results" label that groups numerous ads under that one label, and then sticks a "Hide sponsored results" button after you have already seen the ads. Well, it is leading to accidental ad clicks based on what I am reading and hearing across the industry.View the full article

Grokipedia, an AI-generated online encyclopedia launched a week ago with over 800,000 AI-generated pages, and both Google and Bing have already indexed hundreds, if not thousands, of those AI-generated pages.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 Search new ad layout is driving accidental clicks on search ads...View the full article

Google added a new user agent to the Googlebot's user-triggered fetchers documentation. The new user agent is for the Chrome Web Store named Google-CWS.View the full article

Google Search Console has a bug with its API when filtering on the searchAppearance dimension. This bug occurs when using the notEquals or notContains operators, it will only return rows with the excluded value, instead of excluding those rows.View the full article

We had a few unconfirmed but big Google search ranking updates but we are still waiting on an official core update...View the full article

Did you know that Google Merchant Center will automatically crop your product images in Google Shopping if it thinks it will look better in Google Search? Did you know that you can also opt out of what they call "Smart Cropping"? View the full article