Link Building Strategies

John Mueller from Google wrote on Bluesky, "and let's be honest, people can tell when author bios are used purely as an SEO tactic. It's kinda awkward, not reassuring." This was in response to a post from Nikki Pilkington who said "Stop treating author bios as an SEO tactic and start treating them as what they are '" a tool for building trust with your actual human readers."View the full article

Google Ads has a new feature in the keyword planner tool that will auto-organize new keywords into ad groups for you. This feature will take your new keywords and auto-organize them into keyword ideas in ad groups. View the full article

Google has updated its Google Business Profiles reinstatement emails to now include the case number on the first appeal email. Plus, Google added five proof upload boxes to upload more evidence for Google to review.View the full article

In December, we reported that Google was experimenting with something they call AI Mode. Well, now, we have more details and even screenshots of AI Mode in Google Search.View the full article

I am seeing a ton of complaints in the Google Business Profiles forums about reviews going missing. A lot of people are saying the review counts have dropped from one number to a lower number. View the full article

Google added a new developer document and video explanation on how to use Google Analytics data and Google Search Console data together. One of the biggest confusions I see is when people try to compare the data between those two analytics tools - they measure different things in different ways.View the full article

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

Another update in the revised Google Quality Raters Guidelines that was updated on January 23rd was that they added a section for recipe sites and said that requiring "significant scrolling" or making it hard to find the jump to recipe button is not a good thing.View the full article

Google has announced it made some updates to its ad quality where it now takes into account better measurements for understanding the user navigation experience and if that user will or will not be happy with the ad landing page.View the full article

Gary Illyes from Google reportedly said at event the other day that it is important for us to focus on originality in the coming year. "Originality is something we're going to be focusing on this year. That's going to be important," is how he was quoted.View the full article

Gary Illyes from Google ranted on Bluesky about folks updating the lastmod date in their sitemap files when all they have changed was the date in their footers copyright line from 2024 to 2025. Gary said, don't do it, it is not enough of a change to the page's content to warrant a lastmod date update.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

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

I am seeing a lot of renewed chatter within the SEO industry of a possible unconfirmed Google search ranking update touching down in the past 24-hours or so. The weird thing is that the tools are not really showing much of a spike in volatility but the chatter seems incredibly high.View the full article

Microsoft published its new Microsoft Advertising features that it released over the past month. This goes across Performance Max tools, reporting, new values, targeting, and more.View the full article

Google AI Overviews are now able to show super detailed comparison within Google Search. If you search for two very specific models, Google may give you a ton of details directly in the AI Overview.View the full article

Google / Alphabet reported its Q4 2024 earnings last night, where its ad revenue hit $72.46 billion, up 10.6% from last year's quarter of $65.52 billion. Google's revenue was up 12% with $96.47 billion and its profit was up 30.7% to $30.9B. Search revenue specifically was up 12.5% to $54 billion.View the full article

The folks at Seer put together a study looking at how the click-through rates of the Google organic and paid search results are impacted by having AI Overviews on the page. And the short answer is, AI Overviews seem to be hurting the click-through rates in a big way.View the full article

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

As you know, Google updated its Search Quality Raters guidelines with 11 new pages a couple of weeks ago. But with that, Google also added the term "generative AI" to the quality raters guidelines for the first time, and it is listed 14 times.View the full article

Google is now testing using generative AI to write descriptions within the popular products section in Google Search. We've seen this with knowledge panels, local listings and many other parts of Google Search but I don't think I've seen it for the popular products section.View the full article

Ever since we began seeing the new Yahoo Search AI features and AI Chat, we've been asking if they were powered by their own AI, by maybe OpenAI or maybe Microsoft Copilot. Well, it seems there is evidence that these features are powered by Microsoft Copilot.View the full article

If you embed resources on your pages, those embedded resources can be cached longer than other parts of the page in Google Search. View the full article

Google Ads is offering some advertisers the option to book a tagging appointment with a Google Ads representation through the Google Ads console. This will help you set up an appointment to have a Google rep help you set up proper tracking of your campaigns.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 is testing using AI to generate backgrounds automatically for your shopping campaign images...View the full article