Link Building Strategies

Earlier this week, Google announced Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) and it has a lot of the industry worried. Once SEO named Ramon Eijkemans said, "I hate to bring this, but SEOs: we're gonna be f$@*ed." John Mueller from Google responded on Bluesky and said, "I disagree."View the full article

Every year, for the past 18 or so years, Google's John Mueller has been working on Christmas to provide support to those who need help with their Google Search ranking and SEO concerns. This year is no different; John Mueller has responded to several concerns on Reddit and other social media platforms today.View the full article

Alex Heath and Ellis Hamburger interviewed Google's head of Search, Liz Reid, on Google's progression of AI into Search. It felt like a very candid interview that is worth listening to. In short, Liz is still not sure if Gemini and Google Search will ever fully converge or not.View the full article

Ten months ago, Google said on stage at Google Search Central Live event in the Google Zurich office that we should expect more core update, more update. We now have about two months left of the 2025 year and we are in no way going to see more core updates, more often from Google.View the full article

About a week ago, if you searched for mortgage related math questions in Google Search, Google stopped giving you the answer. Google first introduced its mortgage calculator features a decade ago but suddenly the features disappeared last weekend.View the full article

Google has posted the New Year's Eve Doodle and New Year's Day Doodle on the Google.com home page for when it is New Year's Eve for you and New Year's Day for you.View the full article

Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, said that search ads with AI Overviews are at a baseline, at the same level as search ads without AI Overviews, in terms of ad revenue per query. He added, and now it is just about going up from there, and with AI, he doesn't see it to a problem.View the full article

Lenny Rachitsky interviewed Robby Stein, VP of Product at Google, who we cited here numerous times over the past couple of years. The interview covers how AI is not replacing search, search is not dead, how AI Mode will be incorporated within Google Search, how to do AEO or SEO for AI answers, how AI Mode came to market and more.View the full article

Robby Stein, VP of Product for Google Search, was interviewed on the Silicon Valley Girl channel by Marina Mogilko about AI Search at Google. And one of the questions she asked was on how to show up in these Google AI responses. Robby Stein essentially said there is a lot of overlap between normal SEO for web search but the key difference are the "the kinds of questions" people ask AI versus traditional search.View the full article

Nilay Patel of The Verge had a great one-on-one conversation with Sundar Pichai, Google's CEO. Nilay did put on the pressure around how the changes with AI Overviews and AI Mode in Google Search are impacting publishers in a very negative way, but Sundar seemed unconvinced that web publishing is dead.View the full article

The CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, said he spends time on X on launch days to monitor how real people are using, interacting, and experiencing new Google product releases. He said he is "pretty active on launch day trying to understand what's working."View the full article

Gary Illyes, along with Martin Splitt, of Google posted a podcast explaining the top crawling challenges Google noticed amongst its 2025 year of crawling. The top challenges Google had with crawling included faceted navigation, action parameters, irrelevant parameters, calendar parameters and other "weird" parameters.View the full article

Google has completed the rollout of the August 2025 spam update, following a 27-day rollout cycle. This update started on August 26, 2025 and 12 pm ET, and was completed on September 22, 2025. This was a broad spam update, not a link spam update and was a pretty big and widespread update, similar to the December 2024 spam update but took 20 days longer to rollout.View the full article

We have known for a long time that Google can crawl web pages up to the first 15MB but now Google updated some of its help documentation to clarify that it will crawl the first 64MB of a PDF file and the first 2MB of other supported file types.View the full article

There are some reports coming out that Grokipedia, the AI-based Wikipedia, is now showing a decline in search visibility in both Google and even ChatGPT. This comes after both an indexing and ranking surge in Google Search.View the full article

Jordi Ribas, the Head of Search at Microsoft, touted Bing's growth on social media (X and LinkedIn). He wrote, "Since we launched Bing Chat in Feb 2023, we've seen significant growth in users, engagement and even market share on PC."View the full article

Earlier this month, we covered Google testing what we called contextual overlay link cards in AI Overviews and AI Mode. Well, Google officially began rolling them out yesterday, and they are more like hover-over pop-up link cards.View the full article

Google updated its image SEO best practices and Google Discover documentation to clarify how Google picks a preferred image thumbnail for Google Search and Google Discover. Google wrote it "uses both schema.org markup and the og:image meta tag as sources when determining image thumbnails in Google Search and Discover."View the full article

Google Search representatives often tell us to use the feedback link when we see something that is off or needs improvement with Google Search. Well, what happens when you use that feedback link?View the full article

The IAB and PwC released their annual Internet Advertising Revenue Report, which showed search ad grew 15.9% with $102 billion in ad dollars in 2024. Search ads made up the largest pie of internet ad spending at 39.8%.View the full article

Microsoft Bing announced some interesting updates for IndexNow including how it works now with product schema and that Shopify now supports it and soon Amazon will. This will help Bing and search engines that use IndexNow have more accurate and up-to-date products for their shopping results and shopping ads.View the full article

As a reminder, Google dropped its unofficial support of showing 100 search results per page, which caused issues for third party tracking tools and even Search Console itself. The theory with Search Console is that the scrapers were injecting artificial data into Google and thus the reporting. But is the same happening with Google Ads reporting?View the full article

There is some chatter in the SEO community that Google Image Search may be down ranking, lowering the rankings, of AI-generated images, in favor of non-AI-generated images within the Google Image search results.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

Dwarkesh Patel interviewed Jeff Dean and Noam Shazeer of Google and one topic he asked about what would it be like to merge or combine Google Search with in-context learning. It resulted in a fascinating answer from Jeff Dean.View the full article