Link Building Strategies

I am seeing some signs of a Google search ranking update over the past day or so but the chatter is super limited right now. Many of the tools spike yesterday but like I said, the SEO community chatter was calm. I wonder if this volatility was related to maybe the Cloudflare outage or Gemini 3 rolling out.View the full article

Google is testing removing the "more" results button for Local Service Ads within the web search results. Instead, you are given the option to expand the results to 8 in total but not click through to see more LSA listings.View the full article

Google's John Mueller made a joke about how next year, SEO companies will be offering GEO-Detox services as a billable line item after many of the SEO companies already billed their clients for GEO services.View the full article

As you know, Google finally launched custom annotations within the Google Search Console performance reports. Well, one issue we noticed is that it does not allow for adding annotations for data it does not have yet, like for today. Today, Google rolled out support for current/future dates.View the full article

Google's Gemini 3 and Nano Banana Pro is now available in AI Mode in 120 countries and territories in English. This expands it from Gemini 3 in AI Mode's initial launch just a couple of weeks ago.View the full article

Google has been saying that no one uses the LLMs.txt file, that Google won't use it, that it can be useless, and you probably should noindex it if you do use it. Well, Google itself uploaded an LLMs.txt file for the Google Search Central portal.View the full article

Google is pushing even more ways directly into AI Mode from the main Google home page's search bar. Now when you select to upload an image or file, it will take you into AI Mode by default.View the full article

Google is adding more AI features to Google Discover, specifically pushing people from articles in Google Discover into Google AI Mode. When you click on an article from Google Discover and then click on the three dots at the top right of the screen, you are given three options to go into AI Mode.View the full article

If you look at some of the profiles/sites in your Google Search Console performance reports, you may notice a significant increase in the average position being reported. This happened when Google removed the num=100 parameter and is likely due to scrapers not messing up your data.View the full article

Google has a bug with the Google Ads offline conversion uploads feature. Much, but not all, of the offline conversion data you upload is not being added to Google Ads. This obviously makes the reporting look off and bad for your ad campaigns.View the full article

Microsoft is testing moving the ad labels in the Bing Search results from the left side of the ad to the right side of the ad. I am not sure which makes it harder to see the label or not but I assume Microsoft is testing this to see which will get more clicks.View the full article

On Friday, Google announced a number of updates around translation, language, audio, voice interactions and thus Search Live. Google said it released a more "fluid and expressive conversations when you go Live with Search."View the full article

After several months of testing, Google seems to be rolling out the "Read more" links at the end of some of the search results listings. We saw Google test variations of this back in July and it now seems to be live.View the full article

Google updated its JavaScript SEO documentation for the third time this week, this time to say that "while pages with a 200 HTTP status code are sent to rendering, this might not be the case for pages with a non-200 HTTP status code."View the full article

Google Ads recently added a beta to bring in videos from your social campaigns into your ad campaigns. And now, Google is testing bringing in videos in Merchant Center.View the full article

Google is testing prefilling the search bar in a new Chrome tab, with teasers to encourage you to search deeper with AI Mode. Google is putting in the search box, "Research a topic," "Write something new," "Ask Google," and "Make a plan."View the full article

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

Earlier this year, Google lowered the size of your data segment customer lists to 100 active visitors for the Google Display Network. Now, Google updated that to also be 100 active visitors for the Search Network and YouTube.View the full article

Google's John Mueller posted one of his one-liners, where he called some forms of SEO content as "digital mulch." He wrote, "And let's be honest'"most of that SEO content is just digital mulch. (...) If your blog exists solely to rank, it's living on borrowed time."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. The Google December 2025 core update is done rolling out...View the full article

Here are the most popular articles on the Search Engine Roundtable by number of comments. In other words, these are the articles with the highest number of comments posted in 2025.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 Discover seems to show X posts way too often and some searchers don't like it...View the full article

Microsoft Bing is testing a new home page design where it promotes its AI-powered search and answer engine, Copilot. It seems to be a limited test and is not fully live yet, but it is a big change to the home page, which normally has the Bing custom background, search box, and the news feed below.View the full article

There are a number of SEOs and site owners complaining that they saw a large drop in Google Search rankings yesterday, January 6, 2026. This unconfirmed Google update does not feel as widespread as some of the previous ones we reported on but I wanted to document this one as such, just in case some of you are impacted.View the full article

Google Ads lets you see how your product ads are performing across all your campaigns in a single view. Some advertisers are saying this is a new report, so I figured I'd share what they're noticing. View the full article