Link Building Strategies

Google announced a new bidding update to Google Ads named Smart Bidding Exploration. Google said this is the "biggest update to bidding in over a decade." View the full article

Google announced a number of AI-related features to help advertisers create and manage their ads account across Google Ads and Merchant Center. These include new AI tools for creating ads and creatives and also agentic capabilities to help you with this on the backend.View the full article

Google has published two new help documents on the topic of AI; one on guidance on using generative AI content on your website and the second on AI features and your website. Google also published a blog post on the topics over here.View the full article

Microsoft is testing a double border style around the Bing Search box. This goes around the main search box but not the auto-complete box, I believe.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

Google had a lot of news out of Google I/O, as you would expect. The big item, which we predicted, was that AI Mode is now available to all US searchers without having to opt into it within Search Labs. Plus, Google is testing a number of new features in AI mode including Deep Search, Live Search, personal context, custom charts, AI shopping and yes - Agentic features.View the full article

Surprise, surprise, as I called it, Google is expanding AI Overviews into more regions. I mean, we saw this being leaked a couple of weeks ago, so it is not shocking news. But at I/O, Google said AI Overviews are "now available in more than 200 countries and territories and in more than 40 languages, with support added for Arabic, Chinese, Malay, Urdu and more."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

Google seems to be testing hiding the citations, link icons, for the AI Overviews default view. So when the AI Overview first loads in the Google Search results, the link icon is hidden.View the full article

For the past few weeks or so, Google has a bug where the right side knowledge panel goes missing for business owners when you try to bring up your business listing in Google Search. This is not impacting everyone and it can be random but Google is supposedly aware of the issue and is fixing it.View the full article

Google seems to be testing showing author names and website citations in the AI Overviews. I am honestly not sure if this is new but Christian Kunz said it was and posted about it on his blog and on X.View the full article

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

Google is testing a new link feature in the search results, it is in the form of a link box, in the search result snippet, that when you click on it, it anchors you down on the page to a specific portion of that text.View the full article

Google is testing removing the site names from the search result snippets and just showing the site's URL at the top - title link - position of the snippet. View the full article

Google is once again testing a light blue color, cyan, for its title links in the search results. Google tested this on and off quite a lot over the years, but Google is testing it again.View the full article

Microsoft Bing announced some interesting updates for IndexNow including how it works now with product schema and that Shopify now supports it and soon Amazon will. This will help Bing and search engines that use IndexNow have more accurate and up-to-date products for their shopping results and shopping ads.View the full article

Google Ads has added explanations for your performance changes directly in the charts and graphs in your Google Ads console. You can click the highlighed section of the graph to see explanations for your performance changes, like cost increases or decreases. View the full article

Google announced it has deprecated the Account level control for non personalized ads within Google AdSense's settings in privacy and messaging. Instead, Google said "use the IAB TCF framework for collecting and communicating users' consent decisions in the EEA, UK, and Switzerland."View the full article

Microsoft's Jordi Ribas announced they are partnering with creators to showcase how they use Copilot Search in Bing. Copilot Search in Bing was launched in early April, as its new AI powered search feature.View the full article

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

Since the weekend, Google has started to roll out Google Discover on desktop in many countries and regions. I personally can trigger it in Google New Zealand and some other locations but I am not yet able to trigger it on Google.com in the United States.View the full article

Google has updated its title structured data help document for Google Merchant Center to now recommend you add the product's brand name to the title of the product when it's a differentiating factor. View the full article

Google has a weird and somewhat limited and rare issue with sitemap files within Google Search Console. These sitemap files cannot be fetched and retrieved by Google Search. The issue seems to be related to 5-character subdomains that are on a Polish ccTLD, .pl.View the full article

A month ago, Google said it would soon redirect its ccTLD, country specific domains, for Google Search to its Google.com domain. So Google.de, as an example, would be redirected to Google.com. Well, that process seems to have kicked off on Friday, May 16th for some users.View the full article

Google has a bug with Google Ads where for campaigns running on New Customer Acquisition they are not able to spend the set budget. This bug was confirmed with Google and has been an issue for advertisers since May 15th.View the full article