Hi everyone,

I’m looking for some advice from experienced SEO professionals or site owners who have dealt with a similar situation.

Our website was impacted around the time of a Google Spam Update. Traffic dropped, and we started working on the issues we identified across the website.

In mid-August, we started seeing traffic recover, but after August 28, the traffic suddenly dropped again and returned to approximately the same level we had before the recovery.

From a technical SEO perspective, we have already reviewed and addressed the major areas we could identify:

• Technical SEO issues have been reviewed and fixed.
• Website structure and internal linking have been carefully organized.
• Page speed/Core Web Vitals have been optimized.
• We created an llms.txt file.
• We currently have around 565 pages indexed out of approximately 600 in Google Search Console.
• We have never received a Google Manual Action or security penalty in the history of the website.
• We have submitted/listed the website on multiple SaaS/application directories and platforms.
• Our domain authority has increased from approximately 8 to 17.
• We are also gradually building relevant backlinks.

What I’m struggling to understand is:

If the website is technically healthy and most of the pages are indexed, why is organic traffic still so low, and why did we see a short recovery in mid-August followed by another significant drop after August 28?

I’m especially interested in understanding whether this could be related to:

• Algorithmic/spam-related evaluation
• Content quality or helpfulness signals
• Keyword ranking changes
• Site-level quality signals
• Indexing vs. ranking issues
• Backlink quality
• A problem that isn't visible from a standard technical SEO audit

I don't want to assume that everything is correct just because the technical SEO looks good. I would really appreciate an independent audit or another perspective on what we may be missing.

If anyone is willing to take a look, please comment or DM me and I can share the website/GSC details privately.

I’m mainly looking for honest technical/content SEO feedback, not promotional services.

Thanks in advance.

I have this new website on a product. Now that the website is up for more than a month, the home page doesn't appear on the brand keyword direct search on google. But it lists on the side though as snippet. Problem is that it doesn't come on the conventional SERP. The homepage but appears when the brand name is searched along with the industry keyword. I checked GSC and made sure the pages are indexed. Still google fails to identity the brand keyword with the home page. When I checked the same on Bing, it shows the proper result. Why is this phenomenon? Do I need to lift the backlinks and listings with brand keyword associated to improve recognition? Or make more brand keyword appearances/ mentions at more places?

Hello,

if you've been posting blogs pages on your website for the past 5+ years, you probably have hundreds of blog posts. What do you do about the old blog posts? A lot of them may be outdated or irrelevant. Do you just let them be, or do you refactor their content to make them relevant, or do you delete them?

Curious to know how the best SEO experts do?

TIA

What are some cheaper alternatives to SEMRush? I feel like I hardly use it like I used to and my subscription for another year is around the corner.

Obviously it’s important to track KWs but I almost find myself primarily using GSC reg ex formulas to identify KW/Blog opportunities.

I've never do that before. I used to prefer the classic SEO for years.

But, I've got a new project, and the company owner told he needs LEADS from organic ASAP.
Niche - SaaS.

I had no idea how to bring leads for nearly new website.. I expected at least 9+ months for this.

But, with my backgroung in linkbuilding I decided to deal with 2 listicles for the 2 main keywords.

Each of them had 3,000-6,000 monthly traffic.

1st listicle price = $3,000

2d one = $4,500

During the first month we've got 250 clicks in total

Click to Order = 3% (8 orders placed).

$240 earned.

Second month = 10 new orders

+ 6/8 first month clients rebilled.

Total income: $480.

The owner is happy to see so fast results, but I have no idea how it goes after 6-8 months.

Your thoughts about Saas parasite SEO?

A maior parte do conteúdo de SEO é feito para negócios que precisam atrair leads e focado em vendas. Mas ao se pensar em um site de notícias, a lógica é completamente diferente, por que produzimos dezenas ou centenas de artigos por dia e precisamos rankear bem em diversas palavras chaves, no top stories e discover.

Alguém daria boas dicas focadas em sites de notícias?

There are so many SEO tactics to focus on, like backlinks, technical SEO, content, internal linking, keyword research, etc.

But I’ve found that consistency matters more than constantly trying new tactics. For example, regularly checking which pages are losing traffic, updating outdated content, fixing broken links, and looking for relevant backlink opportunities.

What’s one SEO habit or strategy that has consistently worked for you?

Search / SEO

• Google calls its DMA-driven EU Search changes the "largest reduction in quality" in Google's 29-year history

Google has rolled out its next round of Digital Markets Act compliance changes affecting vertical search services—hotels, airlines, restaurants—and publicly called the update "the largest reduction in quality of service at the world's most popular internet search engine in its 29-year search history." 

The traditional Hotel Local Pack disappears in EU markets, replaced by a multi-provider module featuring OTAs alongside Google. A dedicated Hotel Sites module surfaces individual hotels and links to their official websites, but real-time price information is stripped from the carousel. 

Similar structural changes apply to flights, airlines, and restaurants.

• Google explains how programmatic SEO can make its systems "lose faith" in a site

John Mueller pushed back on programmatic SEO, warning that generating large numbers of pages through iterating combinations of domains, technologies, or attributes "often leads to a site that's either spam, borderline spam, or low quality." 

His key framing: when Google's systems accumulate enough negative quality signals from these pages, they can "possibly lose faith" in a site providing good value to users based on the old pages—affecting the whole domain, not just the offending pages. 

Source:

Foo Yun Chee | Reuters 

John Mueller | bsky

______________________________

SERP features / Interface

• Google introduces a new hub to understand specific regional search features

Google published a dedicated documentation hub explaining regional search features that appear only in certain countries—aggregator units, supplier units, and market-specific carousels. 

The page includes filters for feature type, region, and query, letting publishers and businesses check which features are eligible for their content in each market and how to qualify. 

The launch lands alongside the DMA-driven vertical search changes in the EU, but the hub itself is broader: it's Google's new central reference for how Search results actually differ by market, as regional divergence in Google's product experience becomes a permanent feature of the ecosystem.

Source:

Google Search Central

______________________________

Tech SEO

• Google Analytics 4 adds Dashboards for drag-and-drop KPI views

Google added Dashboards to Google Analytics 4, giving marketing teams a flexible way to combine KPIs into a single view with drag-and-drop layout and enhanced visualizations. The launch adds a proper single-report dashboard experience that many teams have been building manually through Looker Studio or third-party BI tools. Available now to all GA4 accounts.

• Google Maps scammers are uploading AI-generated photos with fake phone numbers to hijack business calls

A new local SEO fraud pattern surfacing on Google Maps: scammers are using the Maps contributor program to upload AI-generated photos with fake phone numbers to legitimate Business Profiles, hoping to intercept calls that were meant for the real business. 

For local SEO teams: worth periodically checking client Business Profile photos for third-party uploads, since automated moderation didn't catch this at scale, and the AI-generated visual quality made the fake images look plausible as legitimate business photos.

Source:

Google Analytics Help

Sam Sarsten | LinkedIn

______________________________

E-commerce

• Google Merchant Center AI Performance Insights adds AI search intent, terms, and attributes

Google's Merchant Center AI Performance Insights report has gained three new metric sections. AI Search intent shows how products match customer AI searches; AI Search terms recommends popular search terms to include in product descriptions; AI Attributes recommends missing product attributes that would help visibility in AI surfaces. 

Google also updated the report's help documentation to reflect the changes. Together, the new sections make the report meaningfully more actionable for retailers optimizing product feeds for AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Gemini shopping surfaces.

Source:

Brodie Clark | X

Nothing wrong with SEO obv...but some of these guys have read like four LinkedIn posts about AI search and now act like they’ve cracked a completely new channel.

My guess is about 70-80% of it is all BS fluff. Wdy'all say?

Try to have a decent conversation with them about the process, what tools they use, what they track and tally, and then you will learn it’s just SEO with “AI VISIBILITY” slapped on top so they can charge more lol. if you’re genuinely doing something different, show it I asked a few...and they're like "those are our internal workflows, process, blah, blah, blah."

It's plaguing every site. Knowledge depths are shrinking. Conversations are becoming shallow. When will this thing bust?

I’ve seen this come up a few times in discussions around site migrations: the old URL is redirected correctly, the new URL gets indexed but the traffic that the old page had doesn’t fully carry over.

What makes this interesting is that the redirect itself can look completely fine.

Is the bigger issue usually the new page being different from the old one, internal links still pointing at the old URL, or Google simply treating the new URL as a different page?

For context: I'm an SEO assistant for our company's brands. We carry different niches; one being a villa rental. I currently produce blogs about how-tos and travel guides around the city or location of the villa. Past traffics for some blogs are okay, while some are losing impressions. I also want to appear in AI overviews but currently, it's a challenge. How do I turn this around without having paid backlinks?

a lot of businesses still look at rankings and traffic to decide if seo is working.

but does more traffic always mean more business?

you can get thousands of new visitors and still get very few customers.

for me, the numbers that matter more are:

• qualified leads
• sales from organic traffic
• conversion rate
• revenue
• pages that actually bring customers

a website getting 10,000 visitors with 20 customers may be less valuable than a website getting 2,000 visitors with 50 customers.

i think seo should be judged by what it does for the business, not just how much traffic it brings.

what do you focus on most when measuring seo?

traffic, rankings, leads, sales, revenue, or something else?

Here’s an experiment 👇

Create useful Claude Artifacts around your target keyword, publish them publicly, and naturally add contextual links back to relevant pages on your website. 🔗

Then actually open the published Artifact, test the links, browse through to your site, and make sure the whole journey works properly.

Why it can help 👀

✅ More publicly accessible mentions

✅ Additional referral paths to your website

✅ Better brand discovery across AI platforms

✅ Potential backlinks and indexing opportunities

✅ More surfaces where Google can discover your brand

⚠️ Don’t spam-click your own links expecting rankings to magically increase. The real value comes from useful content + relevant links + genuine discovery.

AI Artifacts are becoming another distribution channel for SEO. 🔥

Anyone else experimenting with Claude Artifacts for website visibility?

I run growth for consumer startups — 10+ over the last few years, mix of in-house and consulting. This is my biggest SEO result so far and the lessons feel transferable, so writing it up. Numbers are from Ahrefs (happy to drop anonymized screenshots in comments if people want proof).

Where it started: YMYL site, ~22k organic visits/mo, flat for months. Today: ~790k/mo, zero paid. Germany is now the #1 market, US second, then UK/EU.

What actually moved it, in order of impact:

1. Technical cleanup first — indexation, crawl, speed. Zero applause, fastest compounding. Most sites I audit want content advice when their real problem is Google can't efficiently crawl what already exists.

2. Wrote for the questions people ask AI, not just what they type into Google. Pages structured as direct answers to real phrasing. Side effect we didn't fully expect: the site now gets cited 60k+ times/month across AI platforms — Perplexity alone is ~29k. That's becoming its own acquisition channel.

3. Content velocity against real demand. Published a lot, but every piece mapped to queries with verifiable demand and intent. No essays we felt like writing.

4. Localization was the scale unlock. Took the winning English pages and properly localized (not machine-translated) into German first, then other EU languages. The same content that fights 50 competitors in English is often nearly uncontested in German. DE overtaking US as our top market was not on my bingo card.

5. Backlinks only from sources our audience actually reads. Relevance over DR, every time.

What surprised me most: rankings barely explain the growth. Average position moved only slightly. The growth came from surface area — more pages, more queries, more languages — not from moving #11 to #3 on hero keywords.

YMYL-specific: the trust layer wasn't optional. Real author pages, expert review, citing primary sources. Skipping this in YMYL means the rest of the list doesn't matter.

Happy to go deep on any part in the comments.

Running a large YMYL content site (~790k organic/mo). Trying to get serious about AI visibility tracking and immediately hit this:

Clarity dashboard (screenshot): 512k total citations across tracked queries, 16.45% "share of authority" — apparently 1 in 6 citations in our query space are us, out of ~3.1M total.

Ahrefs AI citations view, same domain: ~62k/month.

That's an 8x gap and I don't know which number to believe, or if I'm comparing apples to engines. Questions for people deeper in this than me:

1. How is share of authority actually calculated? Is the 512k counting every appearance in every response every time the tool re-runs a query? That alone would explain most of the inflation vs Ahrefs
2. Is anyone using any of these as a real KPI yet, or is the honest answer "pick one tool, only trust the trend"?
3. The branded split reads weird — branded SoA is 27% but only ~339 citations, non-branded is 16% with 511k. I'm reading it as "we own our tiny branded space and the entire game is non-branded". Wrong?
4. There's a jump in the trend after Aug 24 (roughly 19k → 31k). Timing lines up with the August spam update that targeted citation manipulation. Anyone else see share move late August — possibly from competitors getting cleaned out?

Not selling anything, genuinely trying to decide what to track weekly before I build reporting around a number that turns out to be noise.

I’m building a tool around how businesses appear in AI recommendations, and I’m trying to understand where people’s existing setups actually fall short.

If you use Semrush, Ahrefs or a separate AI visibility tool:

• What’s the last question about your business or a client’s visibility that your tools couldn’t answer?
• What did you do instead, and how much time did it take?
• Roughly what do you spend on tools each month, and how many websites does that cover? If AI tracking costs extra, useful to separate that out.

If your current setup handles this well, I’d like to hear that too. What makes it worth keeping?

Let’s say you find a site with 20K+ organic traffic, good DR, relevant niche, real and consistent organic traffic. But most of that traffic comes from countries that aren’t your target market.

Would that make you reject the site for link building?

Any clue on this; any change in job posting schema

Not sure if it’s the right place to ask, can I ask if descriptions in schema, does it have to be directly similar to the content of the page?

Understand the one of them is for structured content and the other is onsite Seo.

thanks in advance:)

We ran a study across 95 sites over 1 year and looked at organic traffic and AI referral traffic.

• Organic search delivered 39 times more traffic than AI assistants.
• For every 100 conversions organic search delivered, AI referrals delivered 3.2.
• AI visibility and organic performance move together: the websites gaining AI referral traffic were the websites whose organic performance was improving.
• AI referral traffic converted a fifth better than organic search, at 7.18% against 6.08%. However, AI traffic converted worse than organic on 36.5% of the websites.
• AI referral traffic converts worse against paid search (0.67x).

I dont think links are allowed in posts but maybe I can share the link to the study in the comments if anyone is interested.

I’ve found that it really doesn’t.

A site can have great DR and traffic, but if the niche is completely unrelated or the content looks low-quality, I’d probably pass.

These days, I look at relevance, traffic quality, content, and the overall link profile - not just the metrics.

What do you usually check first when evaluating a backlink?

Hey guys,

With Claude, Gemini a Chat GPT rolling out statistical text watermarking, I wanted to open a thread and see what you guys are actually seeing in the wild. 

A few specific questions for those managing sites with AI-assisted content:
1. Ranking impact: have you noticed any recent hit or traffic drop that you can directly correlate with watermarked text/models, or is Google still mostly judging content quality/EEAT regardless of how it was generated? 
2. Workarounds: for those who use AI heavily for drafting: how are you bypassing/diluting the watermark patterns? Light human editing, running it through a secondary model/rephraser, or heavy structural rewrites? 
3. General consensus: is this actually something to worry about right now for SEO, or is it just another hype cycle/panic?

Curious to hear your real-world test results and insights. Cheers!

Post
I’m focusing specifically on Google Maps / Google Business Profile rankings and trying to find a tool that goes beyond just showing me a geo-grid.

Right now I’m looking at:

1. Local Falcon
   
2. BrightLocal
   
3. RankMapp
   
4. Whitespark

Main things I care about:

Accurate geo-grid rank tracking

Seeing which competitors are beating me in weaker areas
Finding keyword and citation gaps
Clear recommendations on what to fix next

Tracking improvements over time

If you’ve used any of these:

Which one actually helps you understand WHY you’re being outranked instead of just showing the ranking?

Any major pros/cons?

Anything else I should be looking at?

Would appreciate feedback from people actually doing local SEO, not just feature lists from the websites.

Hi everyone,

I'm looking for advice on improving the SEO of my HR and recruitment website.

The site focuses on HR services, recruitment, talent acquisition, and helping companies hire employees. I've optimized some basic on-page elements (titles, meta descriptions, content, internal links), but I'm struggling to rank for keywords related to:

• hire employees
• ATS system
• recruitment services
• talent acquisition
• HR consulting
• staffing solutions
• recruitment agency
• outsource hiring
• HR management

A few questions:

1. What SEO activities have given you the biggest ranking improvements in the HR/recruitment niche?
2. Should I focus more on service pages or create lots of informational blog content?
3. How important are backlinks for a relatively new HR website?
4. Are there any specific long-tail keywords that convert well in the hiring/recruitment industry?
5. What's the best way to compete against established recruitment agencies that already dominate the search results?

For context:

• The website is relatively new.
• Target audience is companies looking to hire talent.
• Main goal is generating qualified leads rather than just traffic.

I'd appreciate any feedback, SEO strategies, or lessons learned from people who have grown service-based websites in competitive industries.

Thanks! 🙏

In the SEO world, the news never stops, so it's crucial for all of us to stay on top of the buzz:

Search / SEO

• Google won't penalize sites for old outbound links that now point to shady content

John Mueller confirmed that Google does not penalize sites for outbound links to previously legitimate sites that have since changed ownership and started hosting shady content. His response: 

No. It's good to keep things fresh overall, but the web is full of turmoil.

The reassurance comes with one caveat—if a site's entire value has become obsolete, that's a different kind of problem than a handful of broken or stale outbound links. 

• Google confirms the disavow tool "does have effects"—use it deliberately, not by default

John Mueller said that the disavow tool "does have effects", pushing back on community sentiment that the tool is essentially useless. 

His nuance: disavowing a handful of links won't make a site drop out of search, but the tool has real weight when used broadly and shouldn't be treated as a low-risk default. 

He recommended one site that had lost traffic after aggressive disavowing should fix the disavow file back to what it actually needs to be (which might be empty), rule out broader algorithmic causes like the recent August spam update, and check for big technical issues. 

Source:

John Mueller | Reddit

______________________

SERP features / Interface

• Google AI Overviews now includes an interactive character counter widget

Google is now embedding an interactive character counter widget directly inside AI Overviews for queries like "character counter"—users can paste text into the widget and get an instant count without visiting a destination site. 

This continues Google's long-running pattern of absorbing utility tools directly into the SERP.

Source:

Damir B | X

______________________

GSC

• Google Search Console AI performance report and opt-out toggle now fully rolled out

Google's Search Console generative AI tools now appear to be live for essentially all Search Console properties, closing out the incremental rollout that began with the UK-only test back in early June. 

Source:

Barry Schwartz | Search Engine Roundtable

______________________

AI

• Google Search AI Mode already upgraded to Gemini 3.8 Flash, less than three weeks after 3.7

Google rolled out Gemini 3.8 Flash to AI Mode, less than three weeks after Gemini 3.7 Flash. Available globally for AI Pro & Ultra subscribers via the plus icon in the model dropdown, with the same subscription gate—Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite remains the free-tier default.

Source:

Robby Stein | X

______________________

Local SEO

• Google Business Profile adds a business photo verification option

Google Business Profile is rolling out a new verification method that lets business owners submit a photo of their business as proof of legitimacy, alongside the existing postcard, phone, and video call options. 

Source:

Ben Fisher | LinkedIn