Link Building Strategies

This is a programming note that Tuesday and Wednesday are Simchat Torah and I will be offline the next two days. I will be offline on Tuesday and Wednesday, October 14th and October 15th.View the full article

This is a programming note that Tuesday and Wednesday are Sukkot and I will be offline the next two days. I will be offline on Tuesday and Wednesday, October 7th and October 8th.View the full article

This is just a programming note that I will be 100% offline starting Wednesday night (October 1st) through Thursday night (October 2nd) for Yom Kippur. I am not scheduling any stories on Yom Kippur...View the full article

This is a programming note that Tuesday and Wednesday are Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year and I will be offline the next two days. I will be offline on Tuesday and Wednesday, September 23rd and September 24th...View the full article

Greg Gifford, a veteran automotive and local SEO, published a hard warning to vendors suggesting that they tell automotive dealerships to set up separate Google Business Profile department listings for separate services. He said, do not, do not, do this and that it can lead to your Google Business Profiles being suspended and removed from Google Search and Google Maps.View the full article

Raptive, an advertising-sales company representing thousands of websites (content publishers), filed a 93-page complaint against Google in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The suit says "Google has carried out a sophisticated, anticompetitive, and deceptive scheme for well over a decade" by "manipulating auctions for ad space across the Internet."View the full article

Google added a very useful feature to the Google Search Console Insights report named query groups. It does what it is named, it groups similar queries together as one, so you can see how your site is performing for that specific topic, instead of individual queries.View the full article

Business Insider interviewed both SEOs and representatives from Google, Microsoft, and Perplexity on what it calls the "GEO rush." The rush for SEO companies or other companies to sell GEO (AI SEO) related services. There are quotes from Danny Sullivan from Google, Krishna Madhavan from Microsoft and more.View the full article

Google has confirmed a "rare" bug with Google Ads reporting where it can lead to over-reporting click-through rate percentages. Brad Geddes posted about the issue on LinkedIn, and Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison, responded with confirmation. View the full article

So after Google literally paid Reddit for its content and then ranked them incredibly well in Google Search and its search features, Reddit during its earnings call blamed Google's search algorithm for not hitting its expected user growth.View the full article

On the Reddit Q4 2025 Earnings Call (see transcript here), Steve Huffman, the CEO of Reddit, was asked about how he feels about how Google and OpenAI link or use citations to link to Reddit's content. Overall, Steve made it sound like the interfaces are adapting quickly and he is hopeful they will drive traffic to the conversation (within Reddit) in the future.View the full article

Reddit announced earnings late last week and it boggles me how people love this stock. I am not a financial expert of analysis but Reddit has been saying for some time that 50% of its traffic comes from Google Search. Reddit also said on this Q3 earnings call that its search traffic is flat and that AI is not a traffic driver, at least not yet.View the full article

Google's John Mueller reminded us about when case sensitivity matters for Google Search and SEO when it comes to your URLs. In short, Google will probably figure it out based on two URLs having the same content on it but why leave it up to Google, so make sure to be consistent with your URLs so Google doesn't need to figure it out.View the full article

A new report released by Rand Fishkin at Sparktoro with the help of Datos' panel measure web browser activity showed that about 1/3rd of active web users don't use Google all that much, by that much it means they only do 1-20X searches per month.View the full article

To fuel the debate in the SEO world of the topic of structured data and LLMs and AI engines, we are hearing that once again, AI engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity are not using structured data in any special way. View the full article

The folks at Seer put together a study looking at how the click-through rates of the Google organic and paid search results are impacted by having AI Overviews on the page. And the short answer is, AI Overviews seem to be hurting the click-through rates in a big way.View the full article

Earlier this year, we covered that Google's AI Overviews are killing click-through rates from the Google Search results. Well, Seer Interactive updated the numbers and that CTR decline has continued to decline and get even worse.View the full article

GMBapi posted data that looks at tens of thousands of Google Business Profiles across multiple countries and showed that review deletions have increased significantly over the year, compared to previous periods.View the full article

Over the past couple of weeks, there have been numerous reports of reviews disappearing, being removed, or being deleted from local business profiles on Google Search and Google Maps. Supposedly, this is now a known bug and is being actively worked on by the Google team.View the full article

Robby Stein, VP, Product at Google Search, was interviewed by Zain Kah on Google AI Search features. While most of the conversation are items we already know, he did say a few interesting things that I want to pull out.View the full article

Google seems to be testing the ability to schedule your Google Posts within Google Business Profiles. At the bottom of the add Google Posts overlay, Google is testing a new option named "Schedule this post" that lets you toggle it on and schedule when you want the post to go live.View the full article

One can always find weird bugs in the Google and Bing Search results but these two really caught my eye. Bing Search seems to have a bug for some searchers where the URL in the search result snippet is being cut off. And Google might have a bug that leads to way too much white space between search result snippets.View the full article

This week, we covered more Google Search ranking volatility mid-week. Google Search Console launched query groups reports. Disney's sitelinks in Google Search seemed to have been hacked. Google reminded us about...View the full article

We are seeing volatility in the Google search results this week, Thanksgiving week. Google Ads accounts are being hijacked and it is super concerning. Gemini 3 now powers Google AI Mode for more complex queries...View the full article

This week we covered the Google AI Mode news that it is more visual for many queries, including shopping queries. Google AI Mode agentic capabilities can now be opted into. Google AI Overviews...View the full article