Link Building Strategies

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

OpenAI announced GPT-5.3 Instant and said it "delivers more accurate answers, richer and better-contextualized results when searching the web, and reduces unnecessary dead ends, caveats, and overly declarative phrasing that can interrupt the flow of conversation."View the full article

Google is testing bolding the site names in the search results. We've seen Google bold many other elements of the search result snippet, but I don't think I've covered Google testing bolding the site name portion of the search snippet.View the full article

Google has posted a new help document named Things to know about Google's web crawling. This document currently lists 9 things on how Google's web crawling works. View the full article

Google Search may have rolled out an update for the images it shows in the search results All tab. For some queries, Google is showing a full-width image pack, but with only four wider images, not the five images we saw before.View the full article

Google has reportedly confirmed that the Google Discover feed has recently increased how often it shows social media posts in the feed. We covered this in January, and while we know Google does show social media in the Discover feed, it seems Google is more likely to show these social media posts more often now.View the full article

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

Google AI Mode doesn't always pass referrer data from the links on the sidebar. This is supposedly being looked at by the Google Search team and hopefully will be fixed soon, if not, already.View the full article

Google seems to be rolling out colorful sections in the knowledge panels. Sometimes you will see gray, sometimes blue, sometimes orange and sometimes green and maybe more. We saw this on mobile over a decade ago, so this does seem new, especially on desktop.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 has updated or is updating a number of Google Ads and Google Merchant Center policies. This goes across alcohol, prescription drugs, gambling and games and government documents and services policies.View the full article

Google has published a new help document titled About the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) and UCP-powered checkout feature on Google. This was published in the Google Merchant Center help documentation section.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. There is a Google patent document that implies Google Search might send searchers to AI-generated page of your site...View the full article

There is a Google patent named AI-generated content page tailored to a specific user. It describes the use of AI to create custom landing pages and when a user performs a search, Google Search sends the user to the AI-generated page instead of the page on the company's website.View the full article

Google Search rankings remain heated into March - I mean, I can post about this every day but now I am at the point of just doing it weekly. We thought things might be cooling a bit, but the volatility really has not cooled much at all.View the full article

Google might be allowing publishers to claim their profiles and publications on Google Discover. I mean, there were forms of this for Google News, Google Business Profiles, even Google Search over the years, but there are hints this is coming to Google Discover.View the full article

Are you ready for the monthly Google Webmaster report...View the full article

Google Ads has often used dynamic labels for some of the ad groupings. I mean, we've seen tons of variations of these and I am not sure if they mean anything specific. But here is one that caught my eye, this is titled "Sponsored options in the area."View the full article

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

This week...View the full article

The Google Search team and the Google Ads team released two different videos this week that I thought you should all listen to, at least in the background. In short, Martin Splitt and Gary Illyes from the Google Search team spoke about how browsers parse HTML. Ginny Marvin and Ads UI Product Manager Abby Butler and Search Ads UX Lead Adam Bullock spoke about search experiences with search ads.View the full article

Microsoft Advertising has now rolled out the self-serve negative keyword lists. This launched a couple of days ago and was announced by Navah Hopkins, the Microsoft Ads Liaison.View the full article

Google Ads is rolling out text guidelines for all advertisers globally in AI Max. We thought the rollout started more broadly last October, after it was announced last September, but now it is really fully rolling out.View the full article

Google is testing adding "web mentions" to the retailer store page under the reviews section. I cannot replicate this yet, but web mentions shows what people are saying about the retailer on sites like Reddit and other social platforms, whereas reviews are reviews left on Google.View the full article

Microsoft Bing Search is testing a new layout for videos within the search results. Instead of a list view, Bing is testing a two-by-two grid layout.View the full article