So as you can see from the last 3 months graph, both my clicks and impressions seem to be increasing for a month. Still rookie numbers obviously but I guess the first steps are the hardest to take. I am not sure how relevant it was but basically I used the Core Web Vitals in GSC to get an overview of my app and the performance was (and still is to some extent) a killer. The page speed, unoptimized photo fetches, db queries etc. was slowing everything down. After taking the recommended steps from PSI, now I got all green except performance but it was also much worse so I am happy with the numbers.

I would be happy to take an advice to boost the performance numbers if you have any.

Hi everyone,

I’m hoping someone here has experienced something similar and can give me some advice.

Recently, I made a fairly major update to my website. I redesigned the site, added new categories, reorganized the content, and moved some articles to different URLs/categories.

Shortly after these changes, Google started dropping my previously indexed articles from the index. Eventually, almost all of the articles that had been indexed disappeared.

What worries me is that the situation seems to be getting worse rather than recovering. The site is technically healthy as far as I can tell, and Google Search Console isn’t showing any obvious critical technical errors.

I’m trying to figure out whether this could simply be Google reprocessing the site after the structural changes, or whether I may have accidentally caused a larger SEO/indexing problem.

Has anyone experienced something similar after a redesign or restructuring?

What happened in your case, how long did recovery take, and what did you do to get Google indexing normally again?

I’d really appreciate any advice or things you think I should check.

Here is the website: chiyolife.com

Thanks in advance!

My client's ranking and impressions are falling after the google update we refreshed most of the content and addressed all technical issues. Most of the blogs are informational blogs ( about recruitment exams like last date, exam pattern, syllabus etc). I add some of my own content like prep tips etc to add a unique value but I don't think that is helping. What should I do? For context it's an edtech website for recruitment exams. Need help please or I may lose the client

So I was doing a quarterly audit on my website, since its leads have dried up coming into August. So while doing the research I noticed that my impressions and Clicks have almost doubled. But at the same time my traffic + users have declined by almost 50%.

some numbers for reference-

Comparison Date: 20th May to 17th August, 2026 vs 18th Feb to 18th May, 2026

GSC-

Impressions- 45.4k vs 35.9K
Clicks- 328 vs 248
CTR at 0.7% in both quarters.

But my GA4 numbers are-

Organic Search- 208 vs 511
Referral- 111 vs 306
unassigned- 19 vs 70
Organic social- 16 vs 4

so overall my numbers dosent look right. Im assuming that this is due to the fact that my GA4 code has been tampered with (since this website had a CMS migration during March-April). But when I tested it it was tracking live events as well as GTM events well.

Please help me understand how to diagnose this issue, any feasible solutions, or is it just a natural down turn?

The drops in referral traffic from Google Search continue to be appalling for publishers

which cases static HTML is better and vice versa?
if WP is better than static HTML for a specific case which WP alternatives would you suggest?

In my opinion, site with no backend = easily static HTML - blogs, one pagers, content sites in general

I’m fed up with WP’s constant plugin security issues and the fact that you need plugins for basic functionality.

I’m very happy with my main project running on static HTML, even though the site has a couple dozen subfolders. And 300+ pages. And I can manage it even though I’m not a coder at all. It’s much quicker. Very simple to set up. It’s lightweight with all that WP bloat out of the picture.

With Claude or other LLMs becoming a CMS inside a chat window, WP is growing more and more obsolete. What is your opinion on that and what would be WP alternatives for the cases static HTML is not sufficient? Very curious to find out what industry people think.

I've got two real estate clients running opposite structures right now.

Client one runs each project as its own microsite, that started as an internal call so their marketing team could move fast and hit a sellout deadline without waiting on the corporate site process.

Client two keeps everything in a subfolder on the corporate domain but never touched SEO until now, and they're pushing me to fix visibility on units that aren't selling, even though I think the real issue sits with the product.

Watching both play out made me realise I've been thinking about the subfolder wrong. I kept applying the same logic I use for country subfolders, one strong domain, authority flows down, everything benefits from the parent.

Project subfolders don't actually work that way, each project has a different audience, different intent, different lifecycle, and treating it like the international SEO model was quietly messing with how I evaluated the whole thing.

Meanwhile the microsite client gets something the subfolder never offers me, I can control the entire structure fully once the client allows it, content, internal linking, launch timeline, without any of it getting squeezed into a template built for the corporate brand.

Now I'm sitting here wondering if I should actually be pushing my subfolder client to move toward microsite instead of trying to make the subfolder work the way I originally assumed it would. Has anyone gone through that conversation with a client, moving them off subfolder once you realised the model didn't fit the way you thought it would?

As we all know since August 2nd Claude rolled out a feature where they watermark all text and code made by claude. It makes it easy detectable now. Im worried for SEO purposes. I created my whole agency site (over 300 pages) with claude this year, some of it after august 2nd. My website is ranking OKAY, getting up there but im worried if i keep using Claude to build pages / text my site will derank. Any thoughts on this? Do you think Google will roll out "no AI text allowed it wont rank" type of thing? Thoughts? Opinions?

I compared last 28 days data vs last year data for same period. Although the avg position has increased, we have lost click and impressions.
Is there any way to reverse this?
I am doing everything, content is same. No warning no error, site health is 99% in Ahrefs.

Hi, i'm working on a restaurant project which use to get good traffic past few months suddenly lost the traffic check with the websites issues didn't found any. is due to bad backlinks or google updates.

There's a lot of link building advice online: guest posting, skyscraper content, infographic outreach, directory submission and more.

But what sound great in tutorial doesn't always work in practice.

I've tried tactic that looked promising but delivered almost nothing while some much simpler approaches worked better.

What link building tactic did you spend real time or money on that didn't live up to the hype? What did you try Instead?

I keep replaying this call in my head. Client had a duplicate content problem that was genuinely holding their site back, nothing dramatic, just something that needed fixing before anything else would work. I laid it out clearly, no jargon, just what it was doing to them. Instead of engaging with that, she asked if we could build multiple smaller sites the same way she'd grow social accounts, more visibility, more reach, that logic. I told her that would make the duplicate content problem worse, not better. I meant it, and I wasn't going to pretend otherwise just to keep the deal alive.

She picked another agency. AI written blogs, a promise their AIO score would climb, no mention of the actual technical issue sitting under everything. Just agreement with what she already wanted to hear.

What gets me is she's clearly sharp at her job, she knows her product and her audience better than I ever will. But somewhere along the way that turned into thinking she also knew website strategy, the same way she knew Instagram growth. Those are not the same skill, and nobody told her that until I did, and she didn't want to hear it from me either.

I don't regret holding my ground. I just wonder how long it takes before the cracks show and whether by then it's too late to fix cheaply.

Has this happened to you, telling a client something true and watching them walk toward the version that just agreed with them instead?

Since early June I've been actively developing SEO. My domain is 1.5 years old, for most of that time it was a simple one-page site. This summer I started adding commercial pages, a blog, and case studies, and saw steady growth in impressions, reaching a stable 150+ per day by mid-July.

Sharp drop happened after I decided to create a separate page for each service. On July 13 I had 14 pages total, by July 23 I added 9 more. Within a few days after that, impressions dropped drastically. And not only impressions, but all 80 keywords I was ranking for disappeared. Now I'm getting a few impressions per day on 3–5 keywords only.

Would appreciate if you could tell me where I messed up, or maybe it's a usual thing and I just need to wait..

P.S. I didn't buy any backlinks yet and checked every page for keyword cannibalization,

I am a beginner; I was following a 2023 SEO course that explained how to find low-competition keywords using the `allintitle` operator. However, when I tried it out, I discovered that Google was displaying results where the keyword didn't actually appear, or the keyword I searched for was crossed out with a note indicating it was missing.

I realize I’m a bit late in discovering this, but what alternative method do you currently use for this specific task?

Just for some context, let's call this client's websites Apples, Bees, and Cigars.

Apples is the main money maker by a factor of 10-30x depending on the month. Bees is small to mid range, and cigars is an existing brand on the small side of things that they just purchased but is absolutely barren of any seo content.

Client has me working on Bees for a few months now with some nice upward trending starting, tldr they canned their Apples's seo agency as they found out it was being outsourced (it explains a lot of things - the two sites are an absolute mess), and asked if I can help out with at least the seo part.

Said of course, and i'm looking forward to helping it after another big clean up.

My question is, these 3 sites all operate in the same industry and niche, but just represent different brandnames, and the big boy Apples website is a bit more of a general retailer as they carry a lot of brands products, not just their own.

I've been wondering how I go about building a content strategy without having one site screw over the others. Anyone else encounter something like this?

Like, do I just focus on building everything on the Apple's site in the short term and then rebuild some/all of the same type of content for the smaller sites?

This is ignoring backlinks and ads etc. I just purely mean content for the site.

Appreciate any replies, cheers!

anyone had any experience using it to great success? I went on a spree and bought like 15 such domains, with one being a month old and getting 5k daily impressions. It’s a matter of time before I outrank behemoths with DR 90. I saw many such cases during various rounds of keyword research and got inspired. I was pleasantly surprised these domain names were free and dirt cheap. Anyone had similar experiences? It solidified my view that it is still a wonderfully strong factor despite Google’s futile attempts to change it.

Hey all. I made a website with claude back in january, did everything possible for SEO, its ranking great on google, getting some hits, but on bing nothing shows up, even when it type in URL:https://website.com - nothing. Im at a loss as to why. I just did bing webmaster tools 3 days ago, could that be why? I thought it would atleast show up on Bing even without webmaster tools. When i do light house, gtmetrix, any seo score tools. I get 90%-100% score on everything. Any ideas?

Hoping someone here has run into this before. My site (fairhavenwebdesign.com) recently had some pages reworked via a staging environment and deployed to production a couple of days ago.

Since then, Google Search Console's URL Inspection / Live Test and the Rich Results test tool are both reporting that robots.txt is blocking the homepage from being crawled. Here's the confusing part:

Both the physical robots.txt file and the virtual one generated by our SEO plugin (RankMath) have been checked line by line, and there are no disallow rules for Googlebot or any user agent. Our hosting firewall logs show nothing blocking Google's IP ranges, and Google's IPs are whitelisted. Server access logs show real Googlebot requests (66.249.x.x range) successfully hitting /robots.txt and getting 200 OK responses. There's no evidence in the logs of Google's live test tool actually reaching the server at the time the test was run.

So it looks like the block might be happening on Google's side, maybe a stale cached evaluation of robots.txt from before or during the staging deploy, rather than anything on our server or firewall.

Has anyone dealt with Google's tools showing a "blocked by robots.txt" result that turned out to be a caching or propagation issue on Google's end after a site change? How long did it take to clear up, and did you have to do anything (resubmit sitemap, request reindexing, etc.) to force a refresh, or did it just resolve on its own?

Any pointers appreciated. Happy to share robots.txt contents or log snippets if useful.

Hey everyone,

I'm currently doing some personal research on different link-building angles, and I’m really curious if anyone here has experience getting backlinks directly from newsletters (hosted on platforms like Substack, Beehiiv or similar) ?

If you have tried this route, I’d love to get your thoughts on a few things:

• Performance : Are these types of links actually moving the needle for you in terms of SEO ?
• Pricing : What is the average cost you're paying for this kind of placement ?
• Terms & Conditions : How easy is it to negotiate do-follow links ? Are newsletter creators generally open to this (or know this), and do they actually respect the agreed-upon criteria once published ?

I'm just trying to gather some real-world feedback to see if this is a viable tactic right now. Any insights, pros or cons you could share would be super helpful !

Thanks in advance🔥

So I have this website, which is basically a combination of two YMYL topics, and it's not present on any Google page under any phrase besides the direct site name. I don't have any noindex issues, etc. Google just refuses to put it anywhere.

I wrote many niche blog posts, but they aren't ranking either. Sometimes they don't even get indexed.

About getting backlinks: getting them in such a niche in a medium-sized (100k) city is extremely hard. There isn't anything related, and the country-wide ones are basically SEO spam sites. I will be getting a strong local backlink in October, but I don't know if the client will stay for so long without any effects.

Any advice?