Link Building Strategies

Just like with Christmas day every year, so to with New Year's Day - Google's John Mueller and often other Googlers, are out and looking to respond to some questions on Google Search and SEO. John Mueller so far posted a few times on Reddit this morning, January 1, 2026.View the full article

John Mueller, who works on the Google Search team, responded to a question that asks, "Does extensive Schema markup actually help Large Language Models (LLMs) understand your entity better, or is it just for Google Rich Snippets?" He responded to the question, prefacing it that it is his point of view and "this is not official guidance."View the full article

Google has been saying that 404 error codes are a normal part of the web, that 404s are not a low quality signal and that they don't use up your crawl budget. Now, John Mueller of Google explained why 404s don't matter for SEO.View the full article

Google is testing a blue "Send" button in the search query box on its home page. When you type in your query, you can click "Send" to search Google for that query.View the full article

For the past several years now, John Mueller of Google would come out with what he calls the "Mueller Report of SEO memes." Well, here is his 2025 edition of the Mueller Report of SEO memes. It is fun to scan through, so I'll just embed them all.View the full article

Now that the December 2025 core update is officially done, some are looking at the damage it caused. A number of very visible news publishers saw some significant declines in Google Search visibility with this latest core update.View the full article

Google completed the December 2025 core update this week and it hit some news publishers incredibly hard. I posted the annual Google algorithm update infographic. Google's Frankenstein AI-recipes are a complete horror. Google questioned the need for ccTLDs for international SEO...View the full article

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

Google added a new button to the Google Ads Change history report that lets advertisers quickly jump to different campaigns and ad groups in this report. It should be a big time saver for some advertisers.View the full article

Google Search Console's link report seems to be either missing data or is now showing fewer links. I suspect it is a bug but I also don't think Google spends too much time monitoring this report within Search Console.View the full article

Google is working on fixing an issue where some searchers are seeing squished images within the Google Search knowledge panels. I personally cannot replicate this but it seems to be happening for a number of searchers.View the full article

Google has been showing social media posts in Google Discover, including posts from X for a while now, and Google may even show more posts from those you follow. But is Google showing too many social media posts from X in your Google Discover feed?View the full article

It is January 2026, and it is now time for the monthly Google Webmaster report, where I recap the most important Google organic stories of the past month. Obviously, the Google December 2025 core update was the big one, it ran for 18 days and it really had a large impact on many sites.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

Google Ads will update its advertising policies to allow ads for Prediction Markets starting on January 21, 2026. This will be allowed in the United States, but only for federally regulated entities.View the full article

Last November, Google announced it was dropping support for a number of structured data types and search features. One of those was practice problem structured data types, and now, Google has removed the help documentation along with 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

A month ago, Google added LLMs.txt files to many of its developer and documentation sites including the Search developer docs. As you know, Google pulled it off the Search developer docs within a day or so but the LLMs.txt files still remain on many of Google's other sites.View the full article

Google posted a new job listing looking to hire a new Senior Software Engineer, Search, AI Answers Quality. The job post says "Help the AI Answers Quality team deliver AI Overviews to users' hard and complicated queries on the SRP and in AI Mode."View the full article

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

Google is hiring a Chief of Staff on Search Intelligence, Strategy and Operations. This job is to "help architect the next era of Search with AI," Rajan Patel, the Vice President of Search Engineering of Google, posted on LinkedIn.View the full article

Google's Robby Stein confirmed (again) that Google is personalizing some of the AI experiences, including AI Overviews and AI Mode. He said this on the CNN, Terms of Service podcast with Clare Duffy.View the full article

Microsoft is testing a much larger "Ask Copilot" button on the Bing home page. Normally, Bing only has a small Copilot logo on the right of the search box but in this test, Bing writes it all out - "Ask Copilot" with the logo.View the full article

Google will update how it handles multi-channel products, products sold both online and locally in the store, to help with managing inventory. Google emailed merchants that this applies to and the changes go into effect this March.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