After more than 15 years in enterprise SEO across six major corporations, I’ve seen more careers derailed by internal politics than by Google updates. Many SEOs moving from agency to in-house assume that staying current with algorithms and improving rankings will be enough. In reality, the harder work is navigating the organization and the people […]
Google is “strongly recommending” Performance Max to advertisers. With its promise of automated optimization across all Google inventory and AI-driven functions, it’s easy to see why Google pushes it so heavily. But here’s the reality: Performance Max isn’t always the best choice, and blindly migrating from Standard Shopping campaigns can actually hurt your performance. B2B […]
For the past two years, we’ve been living in AI’s gold rush era. To borrow from Taylor Swift, think of it as the “Lover” phase where everything is shiny, new, and full of possibility. The behavior: Buy everything. The metric: Can it generate something cool? The vibe: Pure FOMO. But we’re entering a new era […]
The December 2025 core update is the main story this week. Google confirmed a new broad ranking update, clarified how often core changes happen, expanded Preferred Sources in Top Stories, and started testing social performance data in Search Console Insights. Here’s what matters for your work. Google Releases December 2025 Core Update Google has released […]
The PPC platforms rolled out a few meaningful updates this week that shape how we measure, plan, and buy media. Google introduced a new API that makes it easier to bring first party data into Ads. YouTube shared improvements to the Shorts advertising experience. LinkedIn launched Reserved Ads to give advertisers more control over pricing […]
One of the major things we talk about with large language models (LLMs) is content creation at scale, and it’s easy for that to become a crutch. We’re all time poor and looking for ways to make our lives easier – so what if you could use tools like Claude and ChatGPT to frame your […]
I expected the dark-themed landing page to lose. Everything I knew about conversion optimization said the light background should win. Light themes are standard for B2B lead generation pages because they offer better readability, cleaner visual hierarchy, and align with accessibility standards. Unbounce’s analysis of 41,000 landing pages establishes baseline patterns favoring light backgrounds. It […]
Search Engine Land turns 19 today. Nineteen years. Almost two decades of analyzing, explaining, questioning, challenging, obsessing over, and occasionally shaking our heads at whatever Google and the search industry throw our way. And this past year? The pace of change has made it one of the most transformative since we launched in 2006. Through […]
Microsoft is now testing a Google-like redesign of search ads in Bing, grouping multiple sponsored links under a single “Sponsored results” label and adding a “Hide” button that collapses the entire ad block. Driving the news. Sachin Patel spotted the Bing test in the wild and shared screenshots and video showing the new layout. In […]
Google today released the December 2025 core update. Google said this core update “Today we released the December 2025 core update.” This is the third core update of 2025, and the fourth overall update in all of 2025. Google previously had the August 2025 spam update, before that was the June 2025 core update and before that […]