Link Building Strategies

Google Search has been sending 25 percentage points less traffic to news publishers over the past two years, according to the folks over at Newzdash. In 2023, Google Web Search made up over 51% of traffic from Google surfaces to news publishers; that number is now down to 27%.View the full article

Google can show search ads with video formats. I mean, Google has been doing this for a while now, but they are kind of rare to see. This latest one is a video ad from Adidas.View the full article

Google confirmed a new search algorithm update - well, this is just a weather feature - but it is a stormy one. Well, maybe not. Google said Google Search's weather results were updated to what they call WeatherNext 2 - Google's "most advanced and efficient forecasting model."View the full article

Google Search may have rolled out an update for the images it shows in the search results All tab. For some queries, Google is showing a full-width image pack, but with only four wider images, not the five images we saw before.View the full article

Pretty much every data provider that tracks AI Overviews in Google Search are showing that Google is showing AI Overviews more often today than they were a month ago. I am sure this is no surprise to many of you, I mean, we see them so often now.View the full article

Google has offered this feature that shows you your past searches, including being able to see your related activity searches from the Google Search results. Now, it seems, Google added a chart to show that search activity over time.View the full article

Google has this feature in its search results that lets you find results based on the images you've view within Google Image Search. It places this button in the search results that reads, "Find results based on images you've viewed" with a link to "more like these."View the full article

Google would not give a specific date for when we will see independent sites to start surfacing better and higher in Google Search. As a reminder, Google wrote with the March 2025 core update, "We also continue our work to surface more content from creators through a series of improvements throughout this year."View the full article

Google just posted its annual Seasonal Holidays Doodle, Google logo, for the 2025 holiday season. We have Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa coming up really soon now and since it is December 1, Google posted the Doodle.View the full article

Google is now sending push notifications to some users that direct that user to a search within AI Mode. Yes, Google is pushing users to do queries in AI Mode using push notification services from the Google app.View the full article

If you go to Google Shopping and enter a query that is not shopping related, Google will add a button above the shopping results asking you to search Google for that query.View the full article

Google is testing a new label or green text on its shopping ads to tell you when the price of that item is low. The label says "Lowest in 30 days," which says the price is the lowest it has been in the past month.View the full article

Google announced a number of updates to Google Shopping and Search with AI enhancements and expansions. Specifically rolling out vision match, a new try out new looks feature and expanding the try on feature to more clothing.View the full article

Google seems to be testing or rolling out a new AI chat feature labeled "Ask Stores" within Google Shopping. The AI chat feature lets you "Ask about hard-to-find items, shopping, styling, home finds, trending pieces, brands, selling, and more."View the full article

14 months ago, Google updated its documentation around its shopping related structured data warning not to generate your structured data dynamically through JavaScript. Yesterday, at the Search Central Live event in Zurich, a Google engineer explained why - it's because the shopping bot crawls a lot and fast.View the full article

Google Shopping is updating its promotions policy to now allow for promotions on subscription fees and abbreviations. This was updated as of this month, January 2026.View the full article

Google Search is now sometimes showing the ability to filter products in its search results by product rating. I am not sure if this is new or not, but I cannot replicate this but some are seeing the product rating filter/refinement option when searching.View the full article

Google can now show the "price at checkout" within the Google Shopping listings, both paid and organic. I am not sure if this is new, being that Google has had policies about suspending merchants who change their pricing at checkout and even allows Googlebot to add items to the cart for this reason.View the full article

Google is testing a new menu, tab bar, under the search bar within Google Shopping. This new bar most visibly has the super G logo and then contains additional options that take you to search, nearby, deals and for you searches.View the full article

Google announced a bunch of AI-based search features for Google Shopping, AI Mode and Gemini for the holiday season. Google is rolling out the AI Mode comparison feature (we saw it earlier), calling stores feature, AI price tracking and agentic checkout based on the price trigger.View the full article

Google added a new button to the top stories section of Google Search named "Sign in to customize." This leads users who are not logged into Google to sign in, so those users can configfure there preferred sources in Google Search.View the full article

Here is a weird one - doing a site command and Google presenting an AI Overview summary of the results. In this case, the AI Overview was dead wrong - which is not all that uncommon - but why show an AI Overview here? 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

Google AI Mode seems like it got a lot faster over the past day or so. Instead of going through the steps of saying thinking about this, searching for results, organizing results, it just now saying kicking off searches and then looking at sites and then quickly shows the AI Mode response.View the full article

Last week, Shameem Adhikarath spotted a sponsored label on top of the "People also consider" box within the Google Search results. I figured it was a bug with ads not loading but then Shay Harel spotted the same thing a week later. Is this another bug or is this a new ad unit?View the full article