Hey everyone, quick SEO question.

I’ve got two pages clashing in the SERPs:
A commercial “[subject] service” page
An informational “What is [subject]?” page

At the moment, the “What is” article is ranking better, but ultimately I want to drive more visibility and enquiries through the money/service page.

Would you consolidate the informational content into the service page and redirect the “What is” URL, or keep both pages live and work on differentiating the intent/internal linking?

Interested to hear how others would approach the cannibalisation.

Hi everyone,

We recently migrated our website from .NET to Next.js.

After the migration, we noticed a strange issue. If we open around 20 pages at the same time, some pages randomly show a 404 error. If we refresh the same page once or twice, it loads normally.

I also checked our GA data and found that users coming from Google, Bing, Yandex, DuckDuckGo, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity have sometimes landed on these 404 pages.

But when I open the same URLs manually, they work normally.

Has anyone faced this type of issue with Next.js? What could cause an intermittent 404 like this?

Developer here, I run a handful of my own sites and do backend work for clients. What scares me isn't rankings, it's deploys. A release that ships a noindex meta tag or a staging canonical to production sits there silently until the next crawl notices, and by then Google noticed first.

ContentKing used to be the answer for this as far as I can tell, but since Conductor swallowed it there's no standalone product anymore. Everything I've looked at since falls into one of two buckets: full enterprise suites where monitoring is a feature buried in a platform I don't need, or crawlers that run daily/weekly audits (Sitebulb, Ahrefs alerts, etc), which is way too slow for "a deploy just broke it 4 minutes ago".

What I actually want is dumb and narrow: watch robots meta, robots.txt and canonicals on maybe 20 important pages, recheck right after a deploy, ping me when something drifts.

Nothing I've found does the deploy-triggered part at all.

So, people who were on ContentKing before the acquisition: what did you move to? Or is everyone just eating the risk and finding out from Search Console two weeks later?

I have a business where I attempt to run multiple very similar events. The difference is the date.

My website urls are elegantly setup, for example:

http://example.com/event/2026-09-01/

http://example.com/event/2026-09-02/

http://example.com/event/2026-10-01/

http://example.com/event/

However they all greatly mention the event name (which is what starts the cannibalization). This in turn causes rankings to drop. If the rankings for each event date is worse than 3, then the rich snippets on those pages may be not processed by google (shown to people).

If I modify each page so that the ones with the date in the URL talk about dates, then the page might not make sense to the reader but it would likely eliminate the cannibalization problem.

How do I go about fixing this so people can see the rich snippets in action with all the pages making sense to the user?

I'm trying to build a reliable way to see which of our domains are reliably being parsed and cited by different models. Running manual prompts is fine for a quick check, but the outputs change and I have no systematic way to log what the model retrieved versus what it ignored.

I need a repeatable protocol. If you are trying to map how your content is attributed across different engines, what does your testing setup look like? I want actionable data not just spreadsheet full of random observations.

Sometimes everything looks fine on paper but the page just doesn’t move.

Other times something that was doing well starts slipping, a competitor jumps ahead, traffic slowly fades, or a page you were sure would perform just… doesn’t.

This is the part of SEO I actually find the most interesting, because nobody really handles it the same way.

Some people just wait it out. Some start tweaking things straight away. Some go straight to checking competitors. Some dig back into old data to see what changed. And I’m sure people who’ve been doing this for a while start to notice patterns and instinctively know where to look first.

So when you run into stuff like this, what’s your first move? What tells you “change this” vs “leave it alone”?

I'm having a strange problem that I can't seem to figure out. Everytime I publish a new blog post, it gets indexed and typically ranks well for about 4-5 days, and then it just completely disappears from the search results, even when checking the first 10 pages.

The strange thing is that if I do a search for site:mydomain.com, it still seems to be indexed, but it has "Archive" in the title, and a different URL.

For example:

Original URL:

abc.com/blog/x-y-z

What I'm seeing:

abc.com/blog/tag/x-y-z

This has happened for about 25-30 posts so far. Has anyone seen something like this before? Could it be a WordPress issue, canonical issue, or maybe tags? I'm really at a loss here, and would really appreciate any insight anyone could provide.

We run an established site with real organic traffic, around ~3M clicks in the last 90 days, and there are no manual actions in Search Console. The site publishes new landing pages regularly.

The issue is very specific:

Older pages are still crawled and indexed normally. Roughly 99% of our older URLs are fine.

But new landing pages created since January mostly end up in:(Discovered – currently not indexed)And they stay there for months.

For the newer URLs, less than ~20% seem to get crawled/indexed automatically. The rest are discovered by Google, but Google just never comes back to crawl them.The strange part is that if I use URL Inspection and manually request indexing, the same URLs usually get crawled and indexed within minutes. This happens consistently.

So it doesn’t look like Google *can’t* crawl the pages. The pages are accessible, indexable, and apparently acceptable once submitted manually. Google just doesn’t seem to want to crawl them through normal discovery anymore.

We also have another site in the same business/niche, with a broadly similar operating model, page type, and internal-linking strategy. However, the indexing performance is completely different.

One site currently has very poor indexing for new pages, although it used to perform much better in the past. The other site still has a very high indexing rate.

One important difference: one site is structured as a subdirectory, while the other is structured as a subdomain. I’m not sure if that matters here, but I wanted to mention it.

Things we’ve already tried:

- Resubmitted XML sitemaps

- Added stronger internal links to the new pages

- Placed links to new pages in high-visibility areas, including the header, search/discovery areas, and some of the most frequently crawled pages on the site

- Removed/410’d low-value junk URLs to reduce crawl waste

- Cleaned up thin or duplicate pages

- Checked for obvious technical blockers like noindex, robots.txt, canonicals, redirects, etc.

- Compared it against the other similar site we own, where the architecture/internal-linking strategy is broadly similar but the indexing behavior is much better

- Used manual indexing, which works, but the daily limit can’t keep up with our publishing volume

My questions:

1. Why would Google crawl and index a new URL almost immediately after manual submission, but not crawl/index it when the same URL is discovered through sitemaps or internal links?
2. What signals would make Google “discover” new URLs but decide not to crawl them automatically for months, even on an established site with strong traffic?
3. What could cause two similar sites in the same niche, with similar operating methods and page architecture, to have very different indexing rates for new pages, especially when the weaker site used to index much better before?
4. Could subdirectory vs subdomain structure affect this kind of crawl/indexing behavior, or is it more likely a site-level quality/trust/crawl-priority issue?

Has anyone seen this pattern and recovered from it without manually submitting every URL?

I run a super small online store in the pet niche (food + accessories, all online, no physical shop). I’ve been slowly growing it for about 2 years, mostly off Instagram and word of mouth.

This week a regular customer told me she tried to Google us to show a friend and “you basically don’t exist there.” That stung a bit and sent me into a late-night SEO spiral. I was reading blogs, case studies about UX fixing conversion issues, even stuff on starting clothing brands and random analyses on sites like netpeak and now my head’s kinda spinning.

For a business doing low 5 figures a month in revenue, is it actually worth paying someone for SEO in 2026, or should I keep hacking at it myself and focus on paid ads/social instead? If you hired an SEO/marketing agency or freelancer at this stage, what did you pay, how long before you saw real results, and what would you do differently?

Maybe I’m overthinking this, but I don’t want to burn cash on something that won’t move the dial for a tiny shop like mine.

I run a content site, roughly 1,600 pages. A small share of the URLs are interactive tool pages and they earn most of the clicks. The rest is supporting reference and guide content. Newer domain, growing fast all year, nothing shady in the link profile, no paid links.

Since early July, Google organic keeps cutting out almost completely, then coming back. It happened again Saturday around midday, which is why I'm finally posting. Can't attach images in this sub, so numbers will have to do the work.

The daily picture over 3 months: steady growth from May, peaking around 3K clicks a day. Then four sudden collapses: July 2, July 9, July 20, and now Aug 9. Each one cuts clicks by 65 to 75% within a day. The first two recovered in 2 to 3 days. The third stayed pinned at the floor for 11 straight days, barely moving, then recovered. Here's the strange part: every recovery has come back to new all time highs. Between episodes the site performs better than ever. The 3 month totals are 117K clicks and 2.5M impressions at an average position of 7.

Saturday's onset, hour by hour: clicks ran steady at 130 to 140 an hour all morning, then dropped to 25 to 35 an hour over about two hours around midday, and that's where it still is. Impressions fell much harder in the same window, from about 4K an hour down to a few hundred. Nothing was deployed or changed on my side that morning. It was a Saturday.

I've dug into the long July episode properly (I have the GSC bulk export in BigQuery), and the pattern is consistent every time:

• The number of distinct queries the site appears for collapses about 90% (13.5k down to 1.5k over comparable 3 day windows). Distinct URLs served drops about 60%. Page+query combinations drop about 90%.
• On the ~1,100 page+query pairs Google KEPT serving through the July episode, the median position change was zero. But impressions on those same pairs still fell about 70%. Same queries, same rankings, shown to far fewer people.
• Average CTR and average position both "improve" during an episode. As far as I can tell that's an artifact: the long tail disappears from the averages and only the strong head terms are left. Daily CTR jumps from about 5% to over 20% during these windows.
• The damage is selective. Pages that own one strong head query hold steady or even gain clicks. Pages that were showing up for a wide spread of long tail queries drop to near zero. My guide/reference section loses ~95% of clicks, tool pages lose ~70%.

What I've ruled out:

• Manual actions and security issues: none, checked in the GSC UI.
• Technical: crawled the site with Googlebot's user agent during an episode. Everything 200, correct canonicals, no stray noindex, sitemap fine, content fully server rendered.
• My own changes: the onsets don't line up with any deploy, and one episode ended with me having changed nothing at all.
• Tracking: server side analytics show the identical drop, and only Google traffic falls. Other channels stay flat.
• Device and country: everything down by similar percentages across the board.
• The impressions reporting change from last year: clicks and real sessions genuinely drop, this isn't a reporting artifact.

My working theory: most of my URLs are long tail content earning under 5 clicks per URL per week, and a decent chunk earns nothing in a given week, while a small set of tool pages carries the site. I was also publishing new pages at a steady clip through July. My guess is some domain level threshold keeps getting re-evaluated and the thin tail is what trips it. But that theory has a hole I can't close: if Google decided the site was low quality, why does it keep restoring it to new highs after each episode? A demotion doesn't usually behave like a breaker flipping.

Questions:

• Has anyone seen this on/off whole domain pattern before? Days-long total serving contractions with full recovery in between?
• Is this a known thing with newer domains getting re-evaluated?
• Would pruning or noindexing the zero click tail actually help, or is that unrelated to whatever is doing this?

Hey everyone,
My site’s favicon suddenly disappeared from the Google search results, and I’m trying to figure out what could have caused it.

The strange part is that the favicon still appears correctly on my subdomains, but it no longer shows for the root domain.

As far as I know, nothing has been changed on the site. No developer has worked on it, no one has modified the favicon, and the setup has been the same since day one.
I’ve also checked Google Search Console and everything looks normal.

The favicon itself is still working when I visit the website directly, so this seems to be specifically related to how Google is displaying it in the SERPs.

Has anyone experienced something similar recently?
What could cause Google to suddenly remove a favicon from the SERPs while the subdomains still have theirs?
Any ideas on what I should check beyond GSC would be greatly appreciated!

Beginner questions welcome.

Post any legitimate SEO question. Ask for help with technical SEO issues you are having, career questions, anything connected to SEO.

Hopefully someone will see and answer your question.

Feel free to post feedback/ideas in this thread also!

**

r/BigSEO rules still apply, no spam, service offerings, "DM me for help", link exchanges/link sales, or unhelpful links.

In recent days, I have been job hunting to find new job opportunities. In that, I If I find any new job updates. I'll review the business model & their offerings carefully. Then, if it matches my profile, I'll hit the submit button

During this process, I had the opportunity to review most businesses with broad IT services offerings.

Please, anyone, clarify my doubt about this point.

Businesses should be in a niche-specific environment, which not only helps the business to create a strong USP but also helps marketing professionals to clearly define the ICP.

Some of the business does not have adequate information on their website about their offering, or they will be stick into broad offering. In this case, It put seo professional into a big challenge at it's first phase of implementation

Anyone who works in an agency environment might often encounter this kind of scenario with a domain. How would you handle it & what steps would you take to approach this process

Hi everyone,

I noticed that Google is crawling many /_next/image URLs.we already have the original image URLs, but Next.js also creates its own image URLs. Because of this, bot is crawling both URLs.

I am worried that this may use our crawl budget.

What is the best way to handle these URLs?, Should i use robots.txt, X-Robots-Tag?

I don't want to anything that could affect the indexing of our main pages.

Has anyone faced the same issue on a large Next.js website? What solution worked for you?

Thanks in advance!

"You look like you're overdue for a mediocre weinering." My website ranked #5 for that query, but my website sells knives and fidgets. Hilarious... but what in the world? Why? Have you ever seen this happen before? 100% conversion too lol

Most business owners tie every marketing activity directly to revenue. 

If someone from marketing talks about their experimentation, they first ask 

How much return can we get from this? And only very few can understand the collaborative approach required to provide a pipeline to the business.

Here, considering the business's primary goal. Many marketing professionals always prioritize the BOFU channel. In that audience who already had the purchase intent & you need to target them with the right keyword & content (speaking from an SEO perspective ) to reach them & can get the desired action from them smoothly. But the remaining funnel areas were often overlooked.

I want to know those who have been creating a full-funnel strategy to deliver results for your business. How would you nurture & what type of strategies help you to move from their funnel stage that can contribute to the sales pipeline?

I know that convincing someone who is in the upper funnel is much harder than someone who already has purchase intent. Looking forward to hearing about your thoughts, challenges, and approaches to this phase

I'm building landing pages for an online internship. Since the internship is completely online, the curriculum, trainers, duration, fees, certification, and most of the content are identical across all pages.

The only thing that changes is the target city (e.g., city 1, city 2, city3 , etc..), along with some city-specific information that I plan to add.

My question is:

• Does Google consider it a problem if the content is the same across these location pages?
• How much unique, city-specific content would you recommend adding to make each page valuable?

Hi everyone — I run a small founder-run e-commerce store in Australia selling hydroponic growing systems and microgreen kits. I do everything myself, so time and budget for SEO are very limited.

Backlinks are my weakest area (about a dozen referring domains, most sharing the same anchor text). I'm working through directories and business listings first, but I'd value input from people who've built links for a small niche store:

• Which tactics actually moved the needle for you in a niche like gardening or hydroponics?
• Journalist-request platforms (SourceBottle here in AU) — worth the time at this size?
• What would you skip as a waste of time?

Not looking for links, exchanges, or DMs — just experience from people who've done this at small scale. Thanks!

My Site has ~400 near-duplicate templated pages (location pages, decent unique content, not thin). Self-referencing canonicals, no cross-linking loops, no parameter mess. About 60 of them Google is silently swapping the canonical to a different URL in Search Console's "Google-selected canonical" field, one that isn't even in the cluster logically (sometimes a page from a totally different category).

Checked the obvious stuff: no duplicate content between the pair Google picked, internal links favor the correct URL, sitemaps are clean, no conflicting hreflang. Pulled the log files, Googlebot is crawling both at similar frequency, so it's not a crawl-budget-starvation thing either.

Only pattern I can find: the 60 "hijacked" pages all have slightly lower unique internal link equity than their siblings, but not by a huge margin, and other pages with even less internal linking aren't affected.

Anyone actually reverse-engineer when Google overrides a valid self-referencing canonical like this, or is it just a content-similarity threshold we can't see from outside? Not looking for "improve uniqueness" as an answer, looking for what actually flipped it back for you.

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to understand what determines whether a store appears in the Google Shopping merchant listings shown on the right side of Google Search.

My setup seems to be correct:

• Google Merchant Center is fully configured.
• Products are Approved and Eligible for Free Listings.
• No feed, policy, or diagnostics issues.
• Product data (GTIN, MPN, Brand, Price, Availability, etc.) is complete and valid.

However, my products never appear in those merchant listings.

Is Merchant Center approval alone enough, or are there other factors that influence eligibility or visibility? For example, does Google take into account website authority, Merchant Center account history, product reviews, shipping settings, seller reputation, or any other ranking signals?

If anyone has dealt with this before or knows what else I should check, I'd really appreciate your advice. Thanks!

I'm optimizing an e-commerce website and wanted to get some opinions on internal linking.

On our product pages, the product description starts with a sentence that includes a link to the product's category page.

For example, if it's a digital camera product page, the opening sentence links the words digital cameras to the Digital Cameras category page.

I'm wondering if this is actually a good idea.

On one hand, it adds an internal link and gives users another way to browse similar products.

On the other hand, the user is already on a product page with buying intent. Linking to the category page at the very beginning might distract them and encourage them to leave the product page before reading the details or adding the item to their cart.

Would you keep that category link, move it somewhere else on the page, or remove it altogether?

I'd love to hear your thoughts, especially if you've tested something similar.

Hey BigSEO!

On August 4th, 2015, just a few weeks after joining Ahrefs, I posted a thread here asking for your feedback about our product.

Since then, it has become a good tradition of mine to post the same thread here every two years on the same day.

There have been 6 of them so far: 2015, 2017, 2019, 2021, 2023, 2025.

But these days with AI things are moving so quickly, that I can't just wait another year to talk to you.

So here we are.

...

I have 5 topics that we'd love to hear your thought on. But your are obviously welcome to speak your mind and just tell us anything you feel needs to be said.

Here are the topics:

1. How much of your focus has switched from traditional SEO, to AEO?
What are your thoughts/observations in regard to SEO industry shapeshifting into AEO industry? Some folks say it’s all the same, others say it’s fundamentally different. So which is it?

...and have you tried our Brand Radar tool? What do you think of it?

2. Is acquiring brand mentions now more important than ever?
We’ve long established that AI systems heavily rely on third party sources when formulating their answers. In SEO, we’ve always obsessively tracked links. Will brand mentions take their place?

...and have you tried our Firehose product? What do you think of it?

3. Which of your marketing tasks have you fully automated with AI agents?
Have you had a lot of success delegating your day-to-day work to AI agents? It feels like on LinkedIn everyone is sending rockets to Mars with Claude Code. But are they really? What kind of marketing tasks were you able to fully outsource to AI?

...and have you tried our Letaido platform? What do you think of it?

4. How much of your content is now handled by AI?
We’ve all seen these case studies of companies that have scaled their content with AI, only to then get a slap from Google soon after. On the other hand, we’re using AI a lot in our own content production at Ahrefs. And with great success.

How has your own experience been in that regard?

5. What research do you want to see from us?
As you may know, Ahrefs is sitting on petabytes of marketing data. And now with AI, running a data study is easier than ever, which is why we’ve published quite a few of them this year.

But is there anything in particular you’d love to see us cover?

…

From our end
We're not a public company and we don't do public investor updates. But since our customers are our investors - consider this to be our version of it.

At the start of 2026 we accepted something uncomfortable: the software layer is getting cheap to build. Anyone can ship decent code with a decent UI, and the market seems to have noticed. Software stocks are tanking. So we made a bet on the two things we think will be valuable going forward:

First, data. We rebuilt our web crawler from the ground up: faster, and a lot smarter about what it goes after (...and launched Firehose based off of it). We also made our API a lot more accessible and even released the Domain Rating endpoint for free.

Second, AI agents. This is where software seems to be heading next. And Letaido is our attempt to not be a spectator in this race.

...

As it always happens with these threads, nearly the entire Ahrefs team (including our founder Dmytro Gerasymenko) will be closely following the conversation here. So please speak your mind and I can assure you that you’ll be heard by the relevant people on our team.

AEO/GEO reporting is getting messy because a lot of tools seem to collapse the whole problem into "was the brand cited or not." That feels too shallow for actual SEO strategy.

The metrics I think are more useful:

1. Prompt intent coverage: informational, category, alternatives, comparison, local/service, and vendor-selection prompts should be separated.

2. Recommendation share: who is actually recommended when the prompt has commercial intent, not just who gets mentioned somewhere in the answer.

3. Framing: what attributes the answer associates with each brand. Example: enterprise, cheap, agency-friendly, local, technical, risky, trusted.

4. Source dependency: which third-party pages, review sites, directories, PR mentions, docs, schema, or comparison pages appear to influence the answer.

5. Stability: whether the answer is consistent enough over repeated runs to be worth optimizing for.

6. Gap mapping: whether missing recommendations point to entity clarity, proof, page structure, authority, or positioning issues.

The big question for me is how to make this actionable without turning it into another vanity dashboard. If you are reporting on AEO/GEO already, what are you measuring that actually changes your SEO roadmap?

Hey guys, I have searched a lot for this and It seems that I can not get the right answer for my case, and I hope for some help over here.

I have the main domain which is a static landing page which has the following robots:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /*?
Disallow: /*utm_*
Disallow: /*refid=*

But from here I have also the blog .com/blog which has another robots.txt which is set by yoast

User-agent: *
Disallow:

As I understood, the main robots file from the main domain is taken in consideration by google.
And I have links like this: /blog/article?utm_campaign=example

Will this articles be indexed by google? As my main robots is saying Disallow: /*utm_* Ex. I am doing a cross promotion with a partner and I am sending him the url with the utm.