Link Building Strategies

A couple of weeks ago I reported Bing was beta testing a new AI performance report within Bing Webmaster Tools. These reports are now available as a public preview for all to see. Plus, Bing Webmaster Tools has a whole new slick design.View the full article

Google announced a number of updates to help people find and remove personal information and sensitive imagery about themselves from Google. But you would need to give Google this information first, so Google can find it and then remove it.View the full article

Earlier this month, we reported that Google updated two of its help documents around Google's crawler file size limits. Well, Google made a clarification to one of those documents the other day after some confusion within the SEO industry.View the full article

Google added a new button to the top stories section of Google Search named "Sign in to customize." This leads users who are not logged into Google to sign in, so those users can configfure there preferred sources in Google Search.View the full article

Google will stop showing the business short names on Google Business Profiles in Search and Google Maps. The short name will still work, if you have one, but going forward, the link in your Google Business Profile will no longer be displayed to you or searchers.View the full article

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

I am seeing some early signs of yet another unconfirmed Google Search ranking update with more volatility touching down today, February 10th. The chatter within the SEO community is starting to spike, and some of the third-party tracking tools are showing volatility.View the full article

A month ago, we reported on a new help document on Google Ads for Performance Max optimization experiments: A/B testing assets beta. Well, now some are seeing this in the wild, where you can set up these A/B tests in a controlled environment. 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

OpenAI has officially launched ads in ChatGPT yesterday. The company announced, "Today, we're beginning to test ads in ChatGPT in the U.S. The test will be for logged-in adult users on the Free and Go subscription tiers. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education tiers will not have ads."View the full article

Google appears to be testing showing the citation favicon site icons at the bottom of the answer in AI Mode. This is in addition to where it normally shows those icons, at the top right of the card stack, on the side of the answer response.View the full article

Microsoft Bing is testing a dynamically loading results count under the search box. So when you enter your search phrase, the results count will dynamically count up from 0 to the number of results found.View the full article

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

A thread at Reddit asked if a one-year-old website can beat a four-year-old website in SEO and perform better in Google Search. John Mueller from Google answered with his classic "it depends."View the full article

Over the past week or so, Google has been testing a new format for link cards in the AI Overviews within Google Search. When you place your mouse cursor over a link clip icon, a new overlay will show you the page/site cards that line of text is being sourced from.View the full article

The Google preferred sources deeplink button feature is broken and has been since at least last Wednesday. When you click on a button to make a site a preferred source, such as for this site, it does not pre-fill in the site's URL in the box, as it should. You can retype it in the box but it does not pre-fill it for you.View the full article

Google announced on Friday that there is a delay with the Google Ads team reviewing and thus approving developer token access applications. This is because Google is "seeing significant interest in the developer community for Google Ads API access, and are receiving an increase in developer token access applications," the company said.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

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 unleashed its first core update of 2026...View the full article

This week, we covered the first core update of 2026, the February 2026 Discover core update. Meanwhile, there is an ongoing super-heated and volatile Google search rankings. Google has nothing to share about the recent unconfirmed ranking updates...View the full article

We saw Google test follow up questions below the AI Mode responses back in July. Now Google is testing follow up search suggestions, not necessarily in question format, at the bottom of some AI Mode results.View the full article

The Google Ads mixed campaign type experiment beta, which we covered the help document last month, seems to be going live for some advertisers. This feature allows advertisers to test multiple campaign types, budgets, and settings across campaigns in a single experiment.View the full article

We covered how horrific the AI-based Frankenstein recipes can be in Google Search, where it mashes up recipe steps from various publishers and acts like it is a real recipe from a source. Well, Bing had something similar but Jordi Ribas from Microsoft said they are "unshipping" the feature after the feedback was received. View the full article

Last week, Google updated the design for the Google Partner Portal for advertisers. Google said the new look makes it "simpler to understand your goals and to track all your points activity."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