Link Building Strategies

Microsoft has opened access to the Copilot feature within Bing Webmaster Tools. I played a lot with it when I was in the limited beta in December and it is a cool nifty feature to use, but I am not sure how critical of a feature it is.View the full article

Bing Webmaster Tools has been down and/or loading incredibly slowly for the past couple of hours. SEOs began noticing this since around 11 am ET and as of the time I posted this story, it is still down or barely loading.View the full article

You can now compare date ranges of data directly in the Bing Webmaster Tools Search Performance reports without having to export it to a third-party tool.View the full article

Microsoft has updated Bing Webmaster Tools to make selecting the date ranges a lot easier in the performance reports. Now the date selectors are very quick to select, and not deeper inside a menu option.View the full article

Fabrice Canel said Microsoft will streamline the Bing Webmaster Tools notifications because, at times, it can be a bit overwhelming. Fabrice wrote on X, "working to streamline things" when Martin MacDonald complained about getting way too many emails from Bing Webmaster Tools.View the full article

Microsoft is now showing two rows of shopping ads at the top of the Bing Search results. There is even an option to expand them to show more ads.View the full article

Fabrice Canel and Krishna Madhavan from the Microsoft Bing team posted a useful blog post named Does Duplicate Content Hurt SEO and AI Search Visibility? The short answer is yes, and the long answer is also yes.View the full article

For the past week or so, news publishers from Brazil have not been happy with Google. It seems that Google Discover is broken for a lot of Brazilians, showing irrelevant content to users and searchers, and not showing content from the typical publishers based in Brazil.View the full article

Google had a bug in Google Discover that showed the publisher's name and logo twice on a story. The publisher's name showed once at the top and once at the bottom of the article card in the Google Discover feed.View the full article

If you try to access your Google Business Profile page right now, you likely won't be able to. It seems Google Business Profile edit section within Google Search is broken and serves a 500 error when you try to do anything.View the full article

Google Search Console's Discover performance report has a weird bug. It started early yesterday morning where a blue notice prompt would show up and have a mysterious hashtag, with the text "Learn more" and "Got it." This is obviously a bug.View the full article

Business Insider posted a disclaimer about a new AI pilot where it will use "a custom GPT to help publish quick news stories." This custom GPT was trained on the style of how Business Insider journalists write and will all be edited by an editor at Business Insider.View the full article

Google was spotted showing a "Campaign Type" selection option in the Google Ads Channel Performance report attributes section. This showed up for some advertisers, without Google announcing it.View the full article

A report from The Information outlined a number of avenues OpenAI is looking at for ad formats in ChatGPT. The main one that is reportedly being thrown around at the AI company is to show sponsored content within the AI responses given by ChatGPT.View the full article

OpenAI has added local knowledge panels to the ChatGPT results. When you ask for local information and then click on a business name, ChatGPT will load a local knowledge panel on the right side.View the full article

OpenAI announced Instant Checkout in ChatGPT, allowing you to make purchases directly in ChatGPT. This is powered by the Agentic Commerce Protocol that is built with Stripe.View the full article

OpenAI has begun rolling out shopping search features directly into ChatGPT Search across fashion, beauty, home goods, and electronics categories. These are not ads or affiliate-driven, but they are powered by structured data from third-party sources.View the full article

OpenAI announced big news that its ChatGPT Search service is now open and no longer requires a login or an account. It comes the same day that Google expanded access to Gemini 2.0 to all users and where Microsoft said Think Deeper in Copilot is free for all users.View the full article

Google uploaded its Thanksgiving Doodle to the Google Search home page, google.com. It is a typical and expected cute Google Doodle - more on that later. But when you click on it, you are not taken to the Google search results page, instead you are taken directly into AI Mode.View the full article

Cloudflare, which is used by around 20% of all websites (including this one), is having major outages this morning. Lots of site owners are concerned with how this may impact Google, Bing, and other crawlers. The truth is, these search engines have seen this many times before and it can handle it.View the full article

Cloudflare announced Content Signals Policy, a new addition to robots.txt that allows you to express your preferences for how your content can be used after it has been accessed. This aims to block Google from using your content in AI Overviews, but Google would have to comply, which they have not yet, for this to work.View the full article

Google has confirmed there is a bug with Google Ads dynamic remarketing tracking where the data is not flowing into the reporting. Adesh, from the Google team, responded that the Google "teams are actively reviewing this and working toward a resolution."View the full article

After initially going live on Wednesday morning, Microsoft did not officially announce the launch of Copilot Search in Bing until late Friday afternoon. Microsoft said, "Copilot Search seamlessly blends the best of traditional and generative search together to help you find what you need '" and meet you where you're at in your discovery journey."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

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 seems to be ranking Reddit's AI-translated pages all too well...View the full article