Link Building Strategies

Google seems to be testing removing the green checkmark from the Local Service Ads. I was able to replicate this for the same query, and the same set of advertisers. In one case it has the Google Screened checkmark in green and in the other, it does not.View the full article

Google is promoting AI Mode in its search results with a large banner ad. The banner ad says, "New! Try Al Mode. Get Al-powered responses & ask follow-ups with a new experiment. Try now..."View the full article

Google will change how it counts clicks in Google Merchant Center starting April 21, 2025. This change will make clicks count the same way Google Ads counts clicks. This means your current and historical reporting for clicks may change on April 21st.View the full article

For some Google searchers the ability to go to page two of the search results is simply not possible. The classic Google pagination bar is missing at the bottom of the results for some searchers.View the full article

About 30 minutes ago, Google sent out a batch of invites to its new AI Mode. I was one who got that email but when I click on the "try now" button, it still tells me I am on the waitlist and I can't access it just yet.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 spoke about when (if ever) independent sites will see their content surface better in Google Search and hint...View the full article

Google would not give a specific date for when we will see independent sites to start surfacing better and higher in Google Search. As a reminder, Google wrote with the March 2025 core update, "We also continue our work to surface more content from creators through a series of improvements throughout this year."View the full article

Google now is showing Performance Max terms in the Google Ads search terms report. Plus this report shows the new negative keywords terms that is now supported for PMax campaigns.View the full article

On Friday, Google published its findings from its experiment of removing some EU news publishers from its search results. The results said that Google had no visible loss of search ad revenue when the news publishers were removed.View the full article

Google Ads has confirmed that it has lost some conversion data for some advertisers who used Google Merchant Center in February. The data is not coming back, it is unrecoverable. We don't know the exact dates, but Google did mention it was in February 2025.View the full article

Google is testing a new feature in the AI Overviews (although, they look familiar to me for some reason). When you click or hover over on a word in the AI Overview, Google will bring up a menu to get an AI explanation, show related images or copy to clipboard.View the full article

A month ago, we reported that Google Business Profiles support was backlogged and delayed. Well, the delay is not getting any better. Victoria Kroll from Google posted an update on Friday afternoon in the Google Business Profiles to inform us that the delay is still there.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...View the full article

Google confirmed that the volatility we saw prior to the core update was unrelated to this latest core update. I also posted status updates on the Google March 2025 core update. Google is testing AI Search features beyond the new AI Mode...View the full article

As a reminder, the Google March 2025 core update touched down on March 13th, and as Google said, not before. And while many sites were hit super hard in the early days, the net of this update didn't seem as wide as other core updates. Now, I am seeing the third-party tracking tools explode this morning - but is it a tool issue or real core update volatility being detected?View the full article

Google Ads now lets you quickly hide all recommendations with the click of a button. Previously you had to hide each recommendation one-by-one, but now you can hide them all with one click.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 Search Console's API will soon add support for the 24-hour hourly data view, plus, this will give you access to not just the past 24 hours but the past 8-days by hour. 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 hosts events around the world for SEOs, content creators, webmasters, site owners and marketers named Google Search Central Live. They've been doing it for years and I've attended many over the years. This is the first time the event was held in the new St. John's Terminal, which is made to impress - let me say.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 admitted that if searchers don't use your page in the search results...View the full article

There is a big debate in the SEO community on the topic of schema markup and LLMs. Do LLMs like Microsoft Bing's Copilot, Google's Gemini, OpenAI's ChatGPT, Perplexity and others use schema markup and structured data in any way. Fabrice Canel, Principal Product Manager at Microsoft Bing, said they do.View the full article

Google seems to have dropped showing the number of reviews are on a page, the review count, next to the review stars, for non-shopping/e-commerce pages. Google Search is now showing rating review values when using AggregateRating mark-up.View the full article

Google admitted in a video published on its own Search Central YouTube channel that if searchers do not use your page(s) in the search results, those pages may stop showing up in the search results. Martin Splitt said this in a recent YouTube short he posted where he said, "if pages fall off the index again... users don't really use them in search results."View the full article

Microsoft Bing's shopping carousel results have a "buy now" button that now links directly to the checkout page of the merchant. So when you click on buy now, it adds that item directly to the cart of the merchant's website.View the full article