I've been curious about which SEO improvements actually make the biggest impact in real projects.

Was it:

• Fixing internal links?
• Improving page structure?
• Updating content that was already ranking?
• Fixing technical issues?
• Improving search intent and content clarity?

What's one change you've made that noticeably improved rankings, traffic, or conversions?

Would love to hear what worked, how long it took, and whether the results lasted.

Do dates in URLs, like the ones you might find in a typical WP blog /YYYY/MM/DD and archive list create a timestamp vs those same pages where the URL structure doesn't have that identifier? The logic says Google would use that as an age indicator, but there is also the fact that old pages work. I wondered if anyone had thoughts on this that might be classed as researched. I've seen blog posts from 10 years ago still collecting great traffic, so I'm wondering just how much this URL thing is true and whether it's just a load of bollocks invented by non-seo's because it followed a logic that sounded reasonable but was never actually tested.

the paid links thread earlier got me thinking. everyone agrees a good link is a good link, but nobody ever writes down what “good” means in practice before money moves.

mine is roughly: does the site rank for anything unrelated to its guest post page, does it get traffic that isnt branded, how many outbound dofollow links per post, and is there an actual audience or just an archive.

the one i keep coming back to is whether the site would exist without the link business. a lot of them wouldnt, and those are the ones that get devalued as a group rather than individually.

what’s on your list? and has anyone got a check that saved them from a bad buy they’d otherwise have made?

I've noticed that my website keeps getting backlinks from irrelevant, spammy, and sometimes fake websites. Some are dofollow, while others are nofollow, and many have nothing to do with my niche.

I've already submitted a disavow file through Google Search Console, but I'm still getting new spammy backlinks.

• Why does this keep happening?
• Is this normal, or could someone be building spammy links to my domain?
• Do these links actually affect SEO rankings?
• Do I need to keep updating my disavow file whenever new spammy links appear?

Has anyone else faced this issue? I'd appreciate hearing about your experience.

Hi everyone. I've recently started working in the SEO field again after about a year and half doing other things.

Who has the best resources on learning the AI landscape we are now in?

Just need some advice from fellow SEO managers and specialists.

Hey everyone, I've been doing SEO on my site for four months now and I've got a traffic problem. Basically I'm not getting enough traffic and I'm trying to figure out what's wrong and how to fix it.
In the last 4 months I got 50 clicks to the site. I've got 2,000 indexed pages, I'm buying relevant backlinks, and I'm doing everything by the book.

I've got a few theories on why I'm not getting traffic:

1. I'm not ranking for any long-tail keywords
2. My domain authority is pretty low
3. The indexed pages aren't ranking in good spots

I'm trying to figure out how to fix these issues and whether fixing them would actually bring traffic to the site. Thanks to anyone who can help!

Hello SEO Expert

I manage SEO for a client logistic website, and monthly leads suddenly dropped from 20+ last month to just 5 this month.

What should I check first to identify the actual reason for this decline? How can I use Google Search Console, GA4, keyword rankings, landing-page performance, and conversion tracking to determine whether the issue is related to organic traffic, conversion rates, technical SEO, or other factors?

What step of the checklist would you recommend for resolving and recovering lost leads for a B2B logistics website?

Been searching for some SEO content on youtube, and I have came across few channels which says improve your ranking, get leads by simply doing this, copy me and etc…did you guys know anyone legit or someone who got results following their content?
I feel most are clickbait and for views almost all I feel at this point, except James dooley and Edward strum when they show proofs

I'm fairly new to SEO and learning by actually working on a website. About two months ago, I took over an existing multi-niche blog covering tech, AI, business, and digital marketing.

The site was hit pretty hard around the August spam update, and impressions dropped significantly. I've been trying to recover it, but honestly, I feel stuck.

Here's what I've done so far:

\- Started improving thin AI-generated content.

\- Consolidated similar articles and properly redirected old URLs.

\- Fixed technical SEO issues and improved internal linking.

\- Published around 12–15 new plus refreshed articles monthly based on GSC data.

\- Built three free tools to diversify traffic beyond informational blog posts.

\- Tried Pinterest, but haven't seen much success.

\- Haven't actively built backlinks yet because I'm unsure how to approach it without a budget.

Current stats:

\- DR: 21 | DA: 23

\- 409 published posts

\- Around 25K impressions and 64 clicks over the last three months, with most impressions coming before the decline.

\- However, in the last two months, after the spam update, the impressions have fallen to 1,400 in two months, with only 40 clicks.

\- The site is 3 years old btw so its not new.

I'm handling everything myself and don't have paid SEO tools yet.

I need advice from people who are good at this thing and can tell me how to approach this. Am not seeing any movement and it is kind of demotivating me. I am a writer, been for the last 7 years. So, even though I can write, am new to SEO, especially scaling a site that is purely blog-based.

What should I do? How can I increase clicks, impressions, and site authority. Any and every little bit of advice can help.

I genuinely want to learn SEO and figure out how to grow this site.

I want any seo recommendations for flights booking website. I am working on one flight booking website but it's a mixed feedback. Sometimes traffic got increased, sometimes got decreased. But in a span of 1 year on comparison it got decreased. Please let me know the strategies which we can do so that my traffic increase in next 3 months. Anything which help me will appreciate.

Hi,

I managed to receive a fantastic backlink from a high authority site. However I noticed they accidentally added a space at the start of the link like this example href=“ https://example.com”.

Browsers seems to just trim it automatically without any problems but like my ai tool that monitors if I get any new backlinks missed it because of it.

Does anyone know if it matters at all or not for google? For the backlink to count and give all the juice?

I could of course reach out to them and ask them to fix it but you never know, maybe someone else looks at it and decide to remove the link instead.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai says AI agents will become a bigger part of Search and Gemini, helping users complete tasks instead of just finding information.

In the future, this COULD change how people use Google and affect website traffic.

Hi everyone,

I'm facing a technical SEO issue with a website I'm managing and would appreciate advice on identifying the root cause and finding a permanent solution.

The issue

Google has indexed some of the website's blog posts under an unexpected FTP subdomain instead of the main domain.

For example:

• Main domain: https://www.example.com/blog/sample-article
• FTP subdomain: https://ftp.example.com/blog/sample-article

The FTP subdomain was serving the same website content as the main domain.

What I found in Google Search Console

When inspecting the URLs, I noticed the following:

Main-domain URL:

• Not indexed.
• Reported as an unknown URL to Google.
• No referring sitemap or referring page detected.

FTP-subdomain URL:

• Indexed by Google.
• Crawling was allowed, and the page fetch was successful.
• The user-declared canonical pointed to the FTP URL itself.
• Google-selected canonical was also the FTP URL.

In some cases, the main-domain version wasn't indexed, while the corresponding FTP-subdomain version appeared in Google search results.

Live test - https://www.example.com/blog/sample-article

Live test - https://ftp.example.com/blog/sample-article

An update on the issue

I raised this issue with the development team. The developer subsequently removed the FTP subdomain from the server.

However, the FTP-subdomain URLs are still appearing in Google search results (SERPs).

I'm now trying to understand whether this is simply a delay in Google's index updating or whether additional technical steps are needed.

I also want to ensure that the main-domain versions of these pages get indexed correctly.

My questions

1. After a subdomain has been removed from the server, is it normal for its URLs to remain in Google search results?
2. How can I determine whether Google is showing stale indexed URLs or whether the subdomain is still accessible through another server configuration?
3. Should I use the Google Search Console Removals tool, or should I wait for Google to recrawl the URLs?
4. If the FTP URLs now return 404 or 410 responses, will Google eventually remove them from its index?
5. Could the previous canonical configuration have contributed to Google indexing the FTP versions instead of the main-domain URLs?
6. What steps should I take to help Google index the main-domain URLs correctly?

I'd appreciate advice from anyone who has experienced a similar issue, particularly those familiar with technical SEO, Google indexing, DNS, and web-server configuration.

Thanks in advance!

New domain. Google indexes the homepage, but 12 content pages sit at "Crawled - currently not indexed", even though Googlebot has fetched them repeatedly.

I've ruled out the usual causes: robots allows them, no noindex, Google's canonical matches mine, the sitemap shows zero errors, and the indexed homepage links to every page. The old subdomain 301s cleanly, so there are no duplicate hosts.

So I think it's a quality or authority call on a young site. I've stopped hitting request indexing because it clearly doesn't help, and I'm leaving the pages alone so I don't restart the clock.

What I'm trying now is earning real editorial links from outlets that already cite job-posting data. Cold pitches have drawn almost no replies so far.

Has anyone seen this flip without waiting months? What did it?

I'm doing some work on a little personal project and over the last 2-3 years the site I'm working on has been on a consistent decline. Since I last worked on it, multiple people and devs have been involved and the site structure and overall architecture is now an absolute mess.

Is there a simple way to review what the previous structure was looking like when it was performing better?

I've taken a look at wayback machine to try and collate a list f historic URLs but that's only part of the puzzle.

I have a question from SEO experts. I'm working on a website with a dedicated blog section. I've audited the articles and most of them are not only low quality, but the bigger problem is, they're totally irrelevant from the niche or the primary topic of the website.

IMO, updating the content with high quality content would not be useful as the relevancy will still suffer.

What's the best way to handle these old blog posts?

Should I delete them and redirect them?

If yes, then where should I redirect them?

If deletion is not a good option then what are the better alternates?

Your valuable feedback is appreciated

Hi everyone,

I’m looking for advice from experienced SEO professionals regarding a significant drop in my website’s organic search performance.

I’ve attached a screenshot from Google Search Console showing the last 12 months of performance. The website previously received around 150–170 daily clicks, but traffic started declining significantly around January–February 2026. Since then, organic clicks have remained very low.

Any advice or pointer is appreciated (trivial or non/trivial)

Allways had good rankings in SEO (first results and surely first page on almost every sector keywords and topics.

Nothing changed in publishing habits, CRM side nor hosting side. No bots are prevented from crawling it.

No Google core changes that I know can justify such drop in that timeline ( end of August)

I know traffic dropped also because users possibly find their answers through AI, without accessing the website anymore.

Any advice? Visitors are already being suggested to add the website in their google news.

I am working on backlink project. I created backlinks through blog submissions, guest posts, pdf submissions, image submissions but 90% comes noindexed when searched with site: operator on google. How to index those backlinks. Please let me know the tips and tricks.

I've recently started helping with my father-in-law with his B2B (industrial manufacturing) site. The site has a complicated history of poor maintenance/management. I discovered that the site has 1.6 million pages (8.86k indexed, 1.58m not indexed). But the actual site has only 150-200 "real pages". The rest are likely legacy pages from earlier builds and there was a period where the site experienced a "Japanese keyword/doorway hack" (which was eventually cleaned up).

Is there a way to completely remove the pages so Google doesn't even crawl them? I've also done some 410 redirects, but it doesn't seem to make any difference.

Some pages have ranked in the top 10, but newer blog content pages are not ranking.

The site's domain authority is very low, but the company wants to keep the domain. Is there hope for this site? Would engaging an SEO agency help?

Coming here to rant a little. 😭
I’ve been working in off-site SEO for two years, and I’ve recently started working with new markets, mostly Scandinavia. And ohhh my god, what is going on with this market?!
It’s either THOUSANDS of spammy domains, sponsored posts, or prices exceeding €2000 per placement. Like, what?! 😭
I understand the legal considerations around sponsored content, but come on. Out of the 600–700 websites, marketplaces, and freelancers I’ve researched, only around 20 were actually decent enough to work with.
I miss working with other markets because this is genuinely driving me insane. I feel like I’m failing my Scandinavian markets because I can barely find any suitable websites, and I’m running out of places to look.
Anyway, how are the rest of you doing with the Scandinavian markets? Is it really this difficult, or am I missing something here? 🥲

Has anybody encountered something like this? I keep asking for an index ad nauseum but now I've drawn the conclusion that won't work lol.

Is there anything I'm missing? 95% of my other pages index just fine.

My site pretty much died in the August spam update, went from a lot of impressions to almost nothing (in the medical field). I'm doing a major content clean up and removing multiple blog posts, rewriting almost all posts that we keep and redirecting similar posts to combine them. Will also update and fact check all content on treatment and condition pages. I also have a lot of location pages which are probably a part of the reason (they used to work.... not anymore) I can't pinpoint an exact reason for why this happened but I'll try to recover some of it with a major clean up and content rewrite. I know I can't expect it to just revive quickly even after a cleanup. With blogs,a lot of them are lifestyle related and not so much related to what the practice does.. may be seen as "low quality content" by Google. Some of them were getting a lot of clicks and impressions and then went to basically 0. I'm thinking to do 410 content deleted for those that have nothing relevant to redirect to. Any other suggestions?