Link Building Strategies

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

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 completed the rollout of the August 2025 spam update today...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

Google is testing a new AI Search based option codenamed Darksteel. This reminds me of when we caught Google testing 47 different AI Search options back in March but Darksteel was not one of them.View the full article

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

Google Search ranking volatility is heating up today, June 4th. Many of the tools and some of the chatter within the SEO community are showing signs of a Google ranking update of some sorts. Again, Google has not confirmed an update since the March 2025 core update but we've seen volatility since then almost every week.View the full article

Microsoft is testing putting a shopping bag icon on its "Shop Now" Bing Ads layout. I cannot replicate this but normally Bing shows a button that says "Shop Now" and that is it, but in this test, Bing is adding a bag icon before the "Shop Now" text.View the full article

We generally see the AI Overviews show at the top of the Google search results page, I mean, it is an overview, so you'd expect them at the top. But we've seen them show up in the middle of the search results, sometimes even in position two. Now we are seeing examples of them showing at the botton of the search results page.View the full article

Google is now testing summarizing the stories listed on Google Discover with generative AI. Some are calling this adding AI Overviews to Google Discover, which I guess is about the same thing. Of course, publishers may be worried that these AI summaries will reduce clicks from Google Discover.View the full article

This week was a huge week for search; between Google I/O and Google Marketing Live - it was just a lot. We had two unconfirmed Google ranking updates, one on I/O day and one on May 16th. Google announced AI Mode was...View the full article

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

Google has released a new help document named About Ads and AI Overviews, plus, they added a new landing page that contains a link to this single document named Ads in AI-Powered experiences. I assume Google will eventually add a new section named Ads and AI Mode in that document?View the full article

I am seeing a number of complaints from the SEO industry in India and those regions around Google not indexing live broadcast types of content fast with the Google Indexing API. There are quite a number of complaints on X this morning about the issue - to be clear, I cannot replicate it myself.View the full article

Google Ads, sometime after June 2024 and November 2024, updated the size of your data segment requirement from 1,000 active visitors in a 30-day period to 100 active visitors in the same period. This is for the requirement to serve your ads varies based on the target network, specific to the Google Search Network.View the full article

Google is testing a new menu, tab bar, under the search bar within Google Shopping. This new bar most visibly has the super G logo and then contains additional options that take you to search, nearby, deals and for you searches.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

Google has confirmed that AI Mode reporting will be coming to Google Search Console. It is currently not yet in Search Console, but it will be coming as part of the AI Mode rollout. 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 confirmed there is a bug with the referrer links in AI Mode...View the full article

Google is testing a "recently viewed" label in the search results, next to search result snippets that you have clicked on in your recent search history. This is similar to the you visit often label and the other recently visited examples we've seen over the years.View the full article

Google is now pushing search ads on AI Mode and the desktop version of AI Overviews. Google's Vidhya Srinivasan said at Google Marketing Live, "we're expanding ads in AI Overviews to desktop, and bringing ads to AI Mode to create new opportunities for our customers."View the full article

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

Google Search Console's Discover performance report has a weird bug. It started early yesterday morning where a blue notice prompt would show up and have a mysterious hashtag, with the text "Learn more" and "Got it." This is obviously a bug.View the full article

Google has added a new display ads option for ad intents. The new option lets you pick between always show display ads with organic search results or show search ads with organic search results, and display ads if search ads are unavailable.View the full article

I am seeing some complaints within the local SEO community about a surge or spike in name changes happening to Google Business Profiles. It is unclear how widespread the issue is, or if there is a pattern to the issue or not - at least at this point in time.View the full article

Google released AI Mode in the U.S. a couple of days ago and Tom Critchlow and Patrick Stox noticed that Google prevented you from tracking referrer data from AI Mode. Well, that turned out to be unintentional and Google said it is a bug and it will be fixed.View the full article