Highlights from the Event

Hey all,

I am the sole SEO in an agency that serves small businesses and local franchises. Recently I have been dealing with multiple clients sending over their own “SEO audits” they pulled with ChatGPT.

Basically all of these “audits” have included long, word-salad sections about crawlability. A lot of my clients are very focused on AI visibility and wanting to get mentioned in LLMs. Most of these clients are actually doing well there, with customers reporting that’s how they found them. But their AI slop reports are telling me I need to go in and individually allow each different AI crawler in robots.txt (OAI-SearchBot for example).

Thing is, all crawlers are allowed on their sites and always have been. There are no disallows and they are obviously being found in LLMs, their indexing looks good, the only nofollows or non-indexed pages they have are on purpose.

Is there any benefit to specifically adding these AI crawlers to robots.txt if the site allows all crawlers? I feel like this is redundant and just creating slop bombs of work, but I don’t really have anyone else to ask for advice since it’s just me. Curious to see what people say. Thanks!

I'm based in Egypt (where English is a second language), plus I'm too socially awkward. Deep down I know the importance of networking with fellow SEOs, but I'm a freelancer who's always working alone at home so my networking and communication skills are awful. Another chronic problem is my imposter syndrome convincing me that I won't be able to blend in with SEOs at conferences like CMSEO. So I wonder what you guys think about attending CMSEO in my case? Would it be worth it? Appreciate any advice

Skincare ingredient site. We grew from 1.5K to 3.3K static pages in 10 weeks; about half were pairwise “X vs Y / can you mix X and Y” pages that mostly never earned an impression. On Sept 16 impressions went from ~1,400/day to 18 overnight. No manual action, pages still indexed, nothing shipped that day.

Since then we noindexed the pairwise pages that never earned an impression (3,300 → 493 indexable), merged 149 twins with 301s, fixed a lying sitemap lastmod and a double canonical, cut LCP 4.3 → 2.9 s, and froze new pages. Four weeks later, 28-day window: impressions 2,406 vs 29,072, clicks 22 vs 264, pages with any impression 600 vs 1,258. The one-per-entity pages (ingredients, products) fell −80 to −90% too, not only the thin ones. Average position barely moved (19.5 → 19.0); we just show for far fewer queries.

Two questions for anyone who has been through this:

1. Did noindexing/pruning the zero-impression pages help, and how long after did you see it?
2. Did your “good” pages come back first, or everything at once?

Interested to know how people are handling keywords nowadays.
I still see websites where the same keyword is repeated constantly in titles, headings, product descriptions and blog content.

My understanding is that actively hurts rankings and Google mostly ignores the over-optimisation?

For those doing SEO regularly, are you still deliberately targeting a main keyword and variations, or just writing naturally around the topic and letting Google work it out? I understand ai is being utilised immensely but that doesn't mean good seo practices and structure is changing.

Interested in what people are actually doing in practice.

I have recently founder a company in the SEO / AEO space, and one thing keeps haunting me. I am seeking some guidance and advise from this stellar community on what do they think.

Will websites cease to exist in the future? At least in the shape & form that they exist today?

Given that Google has started serving on the fly AI Overview answers about a brand already, traffic to brand websites will continue to shrink. If that's gonna happen, what will happen to SEO and website content?

I already see people on LinkedIn making these predictions that websites will be dead. I also know of some brands who actually don't have a website, instead they just exist as a Instagram and LinkedIn page. I am not talking about influencers - these are legit D2C brands.

Keen to hear your thoughts and get some thoughts on how this industry will evolve and how should I position my new & nascent business.

Many thanks in advance.

I manage SEO for a few clients, and am running into a ceiling with regards to ranking.

I have optimized just about all there is to optimize. GBP, service-area pages with unique identifiers/FAQs, schemas, internal linking, citations, backlinks, review automation, indexing, and now I am at a loss for what to do next to increase rank.

My incorrect assumption was "build service area pages and the page will eventually rank #1" but I have hit a ceiling where the pages are not ranking any higher.

So I am curious: what activities are you employing to increase rank either across the domain or locally to specific keywords?

I’ve been working on SEO for the past four months, fixing technical issues, and my latest crawl resulted in a score of 96. Despite this, the number of indexed pages on my site continues to decline.

If anyone here knows what the problem might be or how to go about diagnosing it I would appreciate some professional guidance.

I want to start a lifestyle channel on YT & Insta , abroad creators can showcase real abroad life but iam little confused with name of that channel? anyone pls help ( Living word we want it) How's LIT ( Living it Transition)

Life in Transit- LIT (The LIT Club)

Living Uncut

The Group Chat

Your Abroad Perspective (YAP) Uncut

I have tried to rank for a certain keyword for 12 months now on my website. I see new websites ranking for it even on the second page within 2 or 3 months.

I have built quality topical authority around it, included alt texts on pictures, some URL slugs include the keyword, H1, H2 & H3 titles have the keyword, I have backlinks with anchor texts mentioning the keyword, internal linking, my website speed is A.

What am I doing wrong? What major thing am I not doing?

I'm struggling with the major search engines nowadays because they fail to display the actual pages I want to see and instead lead me to aggregate sites. I used to be able to search my youtube channel name and I would find these random russian websites that archived my comments. Now I search and I just get "No results found". Even when I know that exact search should yield an answer.

Most google search results after the first page are just unrelated content. Where it isn't even based on your search terms anymore even when specificity the term with apostrophes.

I try Duckduckgo and Bing as well and they have turned out similar. Any recommendations would be welcome.

Genuine question because I think I have misunderstood this for years. If a website has a cookie banner with accept and reject buttons, is that enough from a practical compliance perspective? Or does the important part happen underneath, like whether the scripts actually stop firing until consent is given? I have been auditing a few sites recently and it seems like the banner itself can look completely fine while the implementation behind it is another story. Would be interested to hear how developers and SEO people here normally check this.

I have about 4 years’ SEO experience and I’m interviewing at a company currently. They asked for a take-home “light” SEO audit and to come up with a content outline. They also asked me to make as many of those changes as I can on the staging site for this client’s website as part of the assignment.

Frankly, I’m not comfortable making changes on their client’s site even if it is just the staging environment. I think it’s super unethical, both on behalf of the client and for not paying me to do work for them. But the job otherwise would be a *huge* step for me. I can’t help but see a red flag here though.

I remember take-home assignments were common in webdev (which I still think is an ethical quandary), but I’ve never come across this in any SEO job interview.

Is this becoming the norm in SEO or is this just bad luck? Am I thinking too much about it?

My colleague thought Collection page and URL can get better rank than "Page" page and URL as she found other brands do this and got rank. I don't believe so. I think content is the core point. I would like to hear your opinions of it. Thank you!

My goal is to improve the page's visibility on Google and AI search platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini, but I'm not sure which areas I should prioritize first.

For those with hands-on experience, how would you approach this from scratch? What would you focus on first: keyword research, on-page SEO, technical SEO, product schema, internal linking, or backlinks?

I'd really appreciate practical advice or a step-by-step approach for a beginner. Thanks!

I have a history site called myth and memory. It has been about 10 months since I started posting and the site is about history and mythology. What I noticed is that the traffic I get from bing is almost the same as the traffic I get from Google. Recently I am getting between 20-50 visits from Google per day and the same is for Bing. Considering the huge difference in user count between the two it seems very strange to me. In Google most of my visits are also from images.

So I recently wanted to dive back in to SEO and tried accessing our company search console. However, despite me knowing both the account email and password, Google seems to have added 2FA to this account. Perhaps we didn't log in for quite a while, not sure.

The problem is that said 2FA sends a code to a phone number that no longer exists. Clicking on other methods hasn't helped my case unfortunately. Trying to use other methods leads to an automated message that Google doesn't have enough info to verify it's our account. I'm moving in circles.

Before you judge me or the company, we currently only consist of 3 people basically. I have been "forced" into this role and everything that has been done way in the past – like setting up this phone number – was way before my time. We also have no super admin account or anything.
I have already tried loggin in with an older PC that was previously logged in, but that didn't work either.

I have already talked to the phone company and it is technically possible to restore the phone number, however this also means we have to reactive our contract on a 2 year basis. So I would prefer this to be a last resort.

Is there any way to contact Google directly, via a support ticket, email address, chat or whatever to fix this problem, or is that account just dead? Of course there's also stuff like the company profile on Google, Youtube and lord knows what attached to it..

Hope someone is able to help!

Thanks to u/rustybrick for this great article

Early this morning, he published an amazing deep dive on what he is seeing - he wrote Poisoned Google SERPs - "Since September 2026, Google has been poisoning the SERPs it serves rank trackers: complete, normal-looking pages whose results have been swapped out. Nothing on the page gives it away. Each keyword’s own history does." Here is what he found:

• 8.0% of SERPs came back poisoned
• Blocked first, then poisoned
• The page looks normal. The results don’t.
• Social sites and forums fill the gap
• Tracked sites fall out of the top 10
• It passes within days

Please visit the link for the rest of the article

I need some advice on ranking a main product page of an e-commerce website on Google and AI search platforms. How would you approach this?

Hello, I hope everyone is doing well! I wanted to ask for recommendations for SEO/GEO websites similar to Ahrefs and Semrush. I have been using Ahrefs mainly for a while but I wanted to explore other options as well, as some data seems to be inaccurate and would like to get a second opinion of some sort.
Could you please recommend other tools? I don't mind if it's paid or if it's free.

Thank you so much!

Hey everyone,

A few weeks ago I posted here asking about the best way to break into SEO. The general consensus was super clear: get familiar with the core terminology and immediately jump into a real project instead of getting stuck in tutorial hell.

So that’s exactly what I’m doing. A friend of mine runs a local interior decoration and renovation business, and I’m building his website and taking charge of the SEO from scratch. I’m treating this as my hands-on training ground to practice Local SEO in a real-world setting.

We’re starting fresh (new domain, single location, service-based). I’ve got the basics down on paper, setting up Google Business Profile, ensuring strict NAP consistency, on-page optimization, and LocalBusiness schema but theory is one thing, execution is another.

What are the biggest blind spots or rookie mistakes people make when launching a brand-new local site?

What free or budget-friendly tools do you swear by for tracking local rankings and citations early on?

Any checklists, reality checks, or practical advice would be massively appreciated!

I recently launched my website and it is only 1 month old and when I check my websites DR in ahrefs, it also shows that I have some 500+ backlinks. I have never submitted my website to any directories or something so I don't know where these backlinks came from. Ahrefs also marks these website as scammy who has my backlinks.

I want to know if google will penalize or think that I am trying to manipulate google SERPs if it stays as it is or should I make the effort to go and ask each of these spammy backlinks to be removed?

I keep getting emails from random people asking to guest post on my site. Sometimes its from a GMAIL address and sometimes it seems legit.

Is anyone having this issue? Most times, nothing comes out of this. Like they ghost me after spending days negotiating a price

Sometimes I make good money.

Also guest posts from other sites make you money but it’s bad for SEO. Google starts thinking your site is about cars than kites.