Link Building Strategies

Google's John Mueller said that when it comes to disavowing links "it's in a spammer's best interest to encourage others to spend time on it." Why? Because Google has said there is little reason to disavow links, unless you have a manual action or know you did some bad linking. View the full article

John Mueller from Google said on Bluesky that he sees some SEOs over-focusing on the tiniest SEO metrics and that they should spend their time focusing on more important things.View the full article

Google made what I would consider a logical clarification to its image SEO best practices help document. It now says don't upload the same image under different URL/file names to your site, even if you embed that image on different pages on your site. View the full article

Google's John Mueller once again told SEOs to stop using the Google Indexing API for unsupported content types. The Google Indexing API is supported for job postings and live stream content and nothing else, but yet many still try to use it for other types of content.View the full article

Last April 2024, Gary Illyes from Google said he was on a mission to make web crawling more efficient, he wanted to "figure out how to crawl even less, and have fewer bytes on wire." Gary updated us saying "there's lots more in works" for this but implies some improvements have already been made.View the full article

Google's John Mueller said that there is no persistent shortcut to faster crawling. Yes, you can expedite crawling for specific situations and times, but there is no way to just tell Google you want them to crawl you faster, all the time.View the full article

Google added "Trending posts & discussions" title under What People Are Saying section within Google Search results. It also has those favicons at the top, which I don't think is new but it is all part of the package.View the full article

Google's John Mueller responded to a concern about having bad title tags and how that might impact your site in Google Search. He said on Bluesky "I don't think our systems have a "we don't like this one guy's titles" filter."View the full article

Danny Sullivan, Google's Search Liaison, said it again, that Google does not have a system to recognize if a site is run by a big brand and then automatically just ranks it higher. He said on X, "but no, we don't have a brand-ranking system."View the full article

The other day, I saw the Google News channel on X respond to claims that Google is going to allow merchants to overcharge you for products sold through the new AI checkout protocol. I found it crazy because Google has checks and balances to ensure merchants can't do this and Google responded as such.View the full article

Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison, explained why Google is only letting you add up to 100 negative keywords to your campaign-level negative keywords within your Performance Max campaigns on Google Ads.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

In 2019, Google stopped using rel prev and next as a signal for its search engines to combine or understand paginated results on your site. Then Google offered up some other advice over the years on the topic. Now, John Mueller of Google explains why Google or other search engines don't need to do anything special for pagination or paginated results on your site.View the full article

Google's AI crawler, Google-Extended, the crawler it uses for Gemini and other related AI services, does render itself and can render JavaScript, just like Googlebot, Google's main web search crawler.View the full article

Adam and Joanne Gallagher from the food recipe blog, Inspired Taste, has been documenting a lot of really painful and shameful tactics Google is using for its AI responses to some recipes. Adam calls its Google's AI Frankenstein recipes, where it pulls parts of the recipes from recipe bloggers, says it is the brand's recipe, but changes it enough where the recipe is not real and tastes horrible.View the full article

John Mueller from Google had Danny Sullivan from Google on the Search Off the Record podcast to talk about "Thoughts on SEO & SEO for AI." In short, they both said SEO for AI is the same as SEO for traditional search but then they got into it.View the full article

Here is a new interview published yesterday by The Economic Times Podcasts with Elizabeth Reid, VP of Google Search. She spoke about Google's progression of AI in Search, content quality, SEO, blue links, traffic, the ecosystem, agentic features and more. View the full article

Google posted its first Winter Olympics Doodle, special logo, for the 2026 Winter Olympics. The first sport Google covered is curling. The Doodle is an animated GIF of an Olympian pushing the curling stone down the ice.View the full article

Gary Illyes from Google said that even for him "the change is hard to accept" when it comes to how search is changing and evolving with the new AI features. He said this in response to an article published on the Bing Webmaster Blog written by both Fabrice Canel'¯and Krishna Madhavan'¯of Microsoft named How AI Search Is Changing'¯the'¯Way'¯Conversions'¯are Measured.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

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, a Google Search Analyst, responded to a question on Reddit named Is SEO still enough, or do we need to start thinking about GEO too? In short, John said you should look at the "full picture, and prioritize accordingly."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

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

Google's John Mueller was asked what is the best CMS, content management system, is for SEO and ranking well on Google Search. John replied that all the modern CMS platforms are fine and there are no big differences, SEO-wise, between any of them.View the full article