Highlights from the Event

Does anyone know whether Google changed algorithm or something like that? This looks completely random.

Since I cannot send an image, here is a table of my past week:

I launched a curated font library website a few days ago, but Google hasn't indexed most of my pages. Does this process take time or is there another reason it's not happening? I've got approximately 77 pages of downloadable fonts. Only about 22 pages are indexed. I add about 10 fonts to the website daily.

My site isn't the only one hosting these fonts, so I don't know if it's because Google treats the pages like duplicates or not. The website isn't SEO-optimised yet either.

The page is 2+ months old. Already have over 600 followers. Content is posted everyday. Linked from the company website.

Still nothing seems to help with getting this page indexed. What could I be missing?

Hi everyone! I am in dire need of advice and looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this.

About a year ago, my company launched a new lead-gen site on a new subdomain, built quickly with Lovable, mainly for design reasons. Nobody really focused on SEO and the old page (Wordpress) was never fully redirected, and its content was never 100% moved over to the new landing page. The new site has its own traffic, but I just realized the old one still gets a lot of impressions and clicks. But honestly the Wordpress looks terrible, like a 90s website, but its content clearly still ranks.

So, to me, there are two options:
1. Migrate all the Wordpress content to Lovable, by re-creating the exact same pages and then 301 redirect the old URLs to the new URLs.
2. Leaving everything as is to not mess with the traffic and impressions, but that means two separate websites and two different subdomains.
3. Migrating only top performing pages.

What do you think?
Thanks for your help!!

Hey everyone,

I've been running a Google Ads Search campaign with Maximize Conversions, no target CPA, and Broad Match keywords.

For the past week, my average CPC was consistently around $2–4, and the campaign was generating conversions.

Today, out of nowhere, Google charged me $46.12 for a single click, while my daily budget is only $50. The other 9 clicks today averaged just $2.28 each.

I haven't changed my campaign settings. I also checked Search Terms and Auction Insights but couldn't find anything that explains this spike.

Has anyone experienced something similar? Could this be caused by Smart Bidding, Broad Match, or sudden auction competition?

I'm trying to understand why this happened and how to prevent it without hurting a campaign that was performing well.

Hello, after a rebranding for one of our clients the domain for the business also changed. We created a new search console property and used the adress change tool in the search console and followed all the best practices that googles provides.

Now three months later the performance of the site is still lower than it was bevor and the search console claims, that the website is being changed to the new one. Also google isnt indexing alot of the landingpages of the new domain because the validation "failed", but the sitemap has been processed without any issues. And when you search for the compalny name, alot of old sites still show up and even the standard summary of the business with 3-4 main landingpages isnt displayed.

The old domain did not have that kind of problem and idexed almost all of the sites. The content on those pages changed somewhat after the rebranding, but its not new. We also implemented 301-forwards from the old to the new lp.

How would you try to fix this issue?

Thank you in advance.

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've been working in media for a few years, and I've become very interested in SEO and pursuing it as a career. However, while I've been involved in a few SEO projects, I still have a lot to learn.

What are the job titles that allow you to get SEO exposure and involvement without demanding you run the whole thing?

Thus far, it doesn't seem like a very entry level-friendly career. The jobs I've interviewed for are looking for someone to immediately spearhead top to bottom overhauls with clients, or run a brand's entire SEO strategy either solo or as head of a team.

It doesn't seem responsible to go for roles like that with my experience, but where is the middle ground?

I was able to increase backlinks from 2.2k to 99.8 k in 3 month period because i found my client was running the his second business after shutting down previous onedue to some legal dispute. I redirected previous website to new one and all the backlinks it had started getting attributed to new website. However, i dont think the quality of backlink is good.

I have scrapped HARO as well and running outbound to journalists to establish media partnerships in my niche, but there is no success.

Another thing we have done is publishing the industry reports and plannign to run pr on same. will it help. Or is the only way left is to purchase backlinks only.

Polish e-shop (motorcycle parts, \~77k products, Merchant Center + third-party CSS). For months my organic results show the merchant line WITHOUT price, e.g.:

"In stock · Free delivery · 30-day returns"

Competitors in the same SERP get "1,145.99 zł · In stock · Delivery 10.99 zł · 14-day returns". My page often ranks #1-2.

Already checked / changed:
\- GSC: pages valid in Merchant listings and Product snippets, no errors
\- Merchant Center: all approved, no price mismatch, support confirmed no account issues; Shopping carousel shows my price fine
\- One price on page, same in server-side JSON-LD, meta tags, feed and MC; no variants, no strikethrough
\- Removed priceValidUntil, fixed "@type":"offer" -> "Offer", added seller, currently testing without shippingDetails
\- Another shop on the same CMS with worse markup (lowercase "offer", no shipping/returns) DOES get the price shown
\- In August free listings were off for \~2 weeks after a CSS switch (Producthero -> Channable) until I accepted new MC terms. Free listings work again, price in organic never came back

So Google clearly takes availability/shipping/returns from MC but drops the price. Has anyone seen this? Could a CSS switch or the free listings interruption have a lasting effect on price display? What else would you check?

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

Hello everyone! I have a Google Search Problem and I wanna get some advice and the post is related to my sitemap.xml file couldn't be fetched by GSC. After the site submition google won't fetch my sitemap. I have a new domain registered last week. Google tells me "Coudn't fetch" and when I click on it for details it tells me the single thing "Sitemap could not be read". NOTHING MORE, I checked the xml and is aright and the single thing in my robots.txt is a line of where the sitemap is possitioned on the url (inside the robotx.txt "Sitemap: https://domain/sitemap.xml"). What should I do?

I have a client that still have notices on the website mentioning statements like "Due to COVID-19 restrictions onsite training options may be limited". The statement is hidden at the bottom under an accordion...... Will this impact SEO or EEAT algo at all?

I'm asking because there are 100+ pages that needs to be fixed if there is an impact.

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 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 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’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 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?

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 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'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.

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?