Link Building Strategies

Last month we reported that Google News Publisher Center changes are coming, well those changes should have happened and been fully completed by today. Google updated its help document on the topic to say "Google News is fully transitioning to automatically generated publication pages in late March 2025."View the full article

Google is now sending email notifications for when Google Business Profiles has removed the restrictions on your reviews and ratings. The email says, "Restrictions on your reviews and ratings have been removed" and it comes from the Google Business Profiles team.View the full article

Back in October, we saw Google testing having the "Show more" button in the AI Overviews within Google Search jump you to AI Mode with follow-up questions. Well, Google's Robby Stein announced on X yesterday that this is being tested (after it was tested already) in the mobile search results.View the full article

Brad Geddes dug into how he felt "AI Max can The President your existing exact and phrase match keywords and then claim credit for the conversions and revenue." And then Google's Ad Liaison, Ginny Marvin responded to those specific examples on why this happened and what Google is changing in the future with Google Ads AI Max.View the full article

A thread at Reddit asked if a one-year-old website can beat a four-year-old website in SEO and perform better in Google Search. John Mueller from Google answered with his classic "it depends."View the full article

As you know, January was an incredibly intense month of Google Search ranking volatility. It surprised me that Google has still not confirmed that a Google search ranking update took place. Now, John Mueller of Google was asked about it and said, "Unfortunately, I don't have any insights / updates to share."View the full article

Google's John Mueller responded to a question on the pros and cons of serving raw markdown pages to LLM crawlers and bots. John didn't say much but he did list a number of concerns and things you should be on top of, if you do go down that avenue. View the full article

Last week, Google announced Opal, a Google Labs project, expanded to more regions. Well, it also explained how you can use this tool to create optimized content in a scalable way - consistently and quickly, without much human intervention. Yea, does this seem like something that might be against the Google Search guidelines? View the full article

Last week, Google updated the design for the Google Partner Portal for advertisers. Google said the new look makes it "simpler to understand your goals and to track all your points activity."View the full article

There is a Google patent named AI-generated content page tailored to a specific user. It describes the use of AI to create custom landing pages and when a user performs a search, Google Search sends the user to the AI-generated page instead of the page on the company's website.View the full article

Google announced it has added Waze ads inventory to Performance Max for store goals campaigns and Channel performance reporting is now available in all Performance Max campaigns in Google Ads.View the full article

We covered the topic of Google's AI Frankenstein recipes and how bad it is for recipe bloggers and publishers. But when you have Google's Personal Intelligence serve up these Frankenstein chunks of content, it makes it so much worse.View the full article

Did you know that when Google AI Mode uses Personal Intelligence, Google will add icons of the various connected Google apps used to tailor your message. So you might see a Gmail icon, or Google Photos icon or Search or something else show up as a citation or source near the responses.View the full article

Google's Robby Stein confirmed (again) that Google is personalizing some of the AI experiences, including AI Overviews and AI Mode. He said this on the CNN, Terms of Service podcast with Clare Duffy.View the full article

We've seen variations of Google's popular products section in the search results show both article and video content reviews. But now we are seeing another format for it, one that even links to laptop reviews from 55 years ago, a good ten years before the Osborne 1 hit shelves.View the full article

Google has officially launched scheduling and multi-location publishing for Google Posts in Google Business Profiles. This was a feature Google tested last month and is now fully live.View the full article

Recently, Google rolled out the ability to schedule Google Posts. Supposedly, soon, Google will also roll out recurring scheduling for posts. So you can set a Google Post to repeat and post over and over again on a schedule.View the full article

Google Posts/Updates are starting to disappear from the local panels within Google Search. I saw complaints about this yesterday and tested it by adding a post myself on my business, it was there, until it wasn't. Now I see a huge number of complaints that posts or updates are missing from Google local panels.View the full article

Google has updated its tips to get more reviews help documentation with a new section on tips to write better review replies. This section includes how to make your replies positive and relevant and a section on giving helpful responses to negative reviews. View the full article

Last November, Google announced it was dropping support for a number of structured data types and search features. One of those was practice problem structured data types, and now, Google has removed the help documentation along with it.View the full article

The Google preferred sources deeplink button feature is broken and has been since at least last Wednesday. When you click on a button to make a site a preferred source, such as for this site, it does not pre-fill in the site's URL in the box, as it should. You can retype it in the box but it does not pre-fill it for you.View the full article

Google announced that Preferred Sources is now rolling out globally, after launching just in the US and India in August, following its beta period in June. Plus, Google announced Spotlighting subscriptions are coming to Gemini, AI Mode, and AI Overviews.View the full article

Google is experimenting more with shopping carousels, this time, showing products and then which articles are recommending those products. These can be shown in best of articles and recommended in articles. View the full article

Google reportedly has a bug that displays incorrect product reviews in Google Search for a retailer. It is now pulling from text on the page that includes the Google Business Profile reviews, despite the product reviews not being there and not being marked up on the page.View the full article

Google is now using generative AI, and labeling it as such, within the Google Search product details overlay. When you click on a product listing in Google Search, the overlay window has a section called top insights. That section can be generated using AI.View the full article