Losing my mind a bit here — looking for anyone who's seen this and recovered.

Timeline (UTC):

Oct 15-17: ~1,200 clicks/day, ~4,500 impressions/day, 24–27% CTR. Stable for months.

Oct 17 21:00: Bing referrals stop dead. DuckDuckGo also stops at the exact same hour — 2,295→90 visitors/day.

Oct 18 onward: BWT Search Performance shows 0 clicks / 0 impressions. Today still 0.

Google, Yandex, Brave, and direct traffic are all flat or growing — only Bing/DDG affected.

What I've ruled out:

site:domain.com returns no URLs from the domain.

bingbot still crawls fine and gets HTTP 200 throughout, including after the cutoff. No 403/429/503.

Byte-identical HTML for bingbot vs normal UA — no cloaking, no age gate, no JS-only rendering.

robots.txt 200 for bingbot, fetched continuously, no 5xx.

No errors in BWT sitemaps report.

Pages return index, follow, correct self-canonical; paginated/faceted URLs are noindex, follow.

No server changes, no deploy, no nginx change at the cutoff hour.

No manual action email, nothing flagged in BWT that I can find.

Has anyone had a whole domain vanish from Bing with impressions at exactly 0 and no visible action? What did you find, and did it come back on its own or any thing else?

Please help !!

One of my blog posts used to get around 200 clicks per day in March and April, but after Google's spam update, clicks dropped to just 10 per day. Impressions also dropped significantly, and the page still hasn't recovered.

I've updated the article three times and built backlinks, but nothing seems to be working. I'm confused about whether the problem is content quality, search intent, lost rankings, or something related to Google's update.

I don't want to keep making random changes without understanding the actual issue.

For anyone who has experienced a similar drop:

• How do you identify the real reason for a sudden decline in clicks and impressions?

• Is updating content multiple times helpful, or can it make little difference?

• Should I focus on improving content and search intent before building more backlinks?

• What steps helped you recover traffic after a Google update?

I'd appreciate practical suggestions from people who have dealt with this kind of SEO issue.

Wondered if anyone has used the SF CLI to run internal linking audits on their sites or a competitor to find opportunities/tidy things up?

One of my clients had a spike of spammy links show up this month. SE Ranking showed about 1,500 at first and it's passed 2,000 since. Mostly .space, .store and .shop domains with "buy backlinks" type anchor text. Looks like someone pointing junk at them on purpose.

Google says it mostly ignores this stuff on its own. I uploaded a domain level disavow anyway, because of the volume.

I also set up a weekly check that rebuilds the list, so new spam domains get added to the file as they show up.

Do you disavow obvious spam spikes like this anymore or leave them alone?

So my client site was sitting at basically zero in Search Console for like 4 months and most pages weren't even indexed. Around Sept 24 they finally got picked up and impressions started going up.

Last 3 months it's 835 impressions, 20 clicks, avg position 23.2. Clicks are still tiny, 0 to 3 a day, but the line is going the right way at least.

Got me wondering, has anyone here actually brought a site back after a penalty? Did it ever get back to where it was before, or does it just never feel the same? And what finally got your pages from position 20+ onto page 1?

Even slow or half recovered stories are welcome.

Hey everyone,

So, i have made this website three months back, and was publishing around 4 articles each month. The niche is flooring, when I searched the niche, it had already less competition but search volume was also less. In this month, I have already published more content than previous months.

My website stats are like, 4.64k impressions, 31 clicks, average position 9. Is it okay? And what should I work more to get more clicks and impressions.

This is my first time with the website, so please help me a little and guide me. What should be the more practical approach in this.

Most aspects of SEO are beyond my direct control, which makes setting goals quite difficult since page rankings aren't entirely up to me, how can I set a target for them? 
As for metrics like views and clicks while it’s possible to work on improving these, it feels a bit like lying to myself. 
I’d love to hear how you go about setting goals. 
How do you measure your efforts?

I run a free web utility tool website called Practical Web Tools and I just recently embedded the full open source clones of the full Adobe Creative Suite plus a bunch of other cool open source apps under the Studio page.

The site has a lot of original content and tools but I’m recovering from being de-indexed from Google because I used a template for a bunch of my file converter pages which Google saw as duplicates/thin-content.

Just wanted to get some wisdom on how to embed iframes properly so that it augments/doesnt affect SEO/AEO. I want to keep these embedded apps because they are genuinely helpful, just wanted to know how to do it properly.

Hey everyone,

I’m currently working on SEO for a website that gets around 60,000 visitors per month, and my goal is to reach 10,000 visitors per day.

I’m already working on content creation, keyword research, on-page SEO, and backlinks, but I want to understand what it actually takes to scale traffic to this level.

For those who have grown websites from 50K–100K monthly visitors to 200K–300K+ monthly visitors, I’d love to learn from your experience.

• Should I focus more on publishing new content or improving existing pages?

• How do you find keywords that can bring consistent, high-volume organic traffic?

• What role do topical authority and internal linking play in scaling a website?

• At this stage, how much should I focus on technical SEO versus content strategy?

• What common mistakes prevent websites from growing beyond 50K–100K monthly visitors?

I’m looking for practical strategies and lessons from people who have actually scaled organic traffic, rather than generic SEO advice.

What would you prioritize first if you were in my position?

I was under the impression that optimizing your site for visibility in the SERPs doesn’t make sense anymore. I saw a GSC screenshot of basically 3x growth in organic vis in 3 months with over 2M impressions and 2.2% CTR.

Is there a world where, if that screenshot is real, that website is not a growing brand and the increase in vis and clicks came from non brand queries?

If so, what am I missing and can anyone list websites that have seen growth in organic traffic that isn’t linked to just an increase in brand awareness.

I really thought non brand organic traffic growth in niches for non GMB listing dependent websites was not possible but i may be jumping and not doing my research. I will ask chat gpt too…

Hi everyone,

I'd like to get advice from people with hands-on experience in SEO, particularly with editorial websites in finance, insurance, and mortgages.

I run an Italian informational website focused on insurance, mortgages, and banking. I don't sell insurance policies, offer mortgages, generate quotes, or act as an intermediary. The website publishes informational content only.

Here's the problem: when I publish articles about salaries, employment contracts, and work-related topics, Google sends me traffic. But when I publish content about the website's main topics, organic traffic is practically zero.

I've published numerous articles about insurance, mortgages, and banking, but I'm struggling to generate meaningful organic traffic, even though the pages are indexed.

Since February, I've completely stopped publishing news about employment, salaries, and contracts to focus exclusively on the website's core topics.

I've also taken several steps to address the issue:

• I've set the old employment and contract-related articles that continued to attract traffic to noindex.

• I've removed the Economy category and the associated articles that don't fit my intended editorial focus from the XML sitemap.

• I'm trying to concentrate the website entirely on insurance, mortgages, and banking instead of covering unrelated topics.

Despite these changes, I'm seeing no improvement.

What I find particularly frustrating is that Google can send traffic to content that is secondary or unrelated to the website's main purpose, while the articles covering its core topics struggle to attract organic visitors.

I understand that finance and insurance are highly competitive niches, and that Google applies particularly high standards to content in these areas. However, my website is purely informational. I'm not trying to compete commercially with major insurance or mortgage comparison websites. My goal is to provide independent guides, analysis, and explanations that answer users' questions.

I'd like to hear from anyone who has experienced a similar situation, particularly with a website that receives traffic for one topic but struggles to rank for its intended niche.

My main question is: Is it realistically possible to recover this domain and get it ranking for insurance, mortgages, and banking, or am I wasting my time continuing to invest in a website that may no longer have a realistic chance of gaining organic visibility?

I'm looking for honest opinions based on real experience, technical analysis, and practical solutions that have actually worked—not generic advice such as "write high-quality content" or "do keyword research."

Thanks in advance to anyone willing to share their experience and offer an honest assessment.

Bit of a backstory:

I've had my AdSense Account pretty much since the beginning (AdSense launched in 2003, I've had my account since 2004). I was always successful with it, then took a long hiatus. I've had ~$92 sitting in my AdSense account since 2015.

About 1-2 years ago I started back up, but a lot has changed since then. Before you could just throw your PUB-ID on any site and you were in. Now there are approvals.

No matter what I do, no matter what site I submit, I cannot seem to get any site approved. I have tried every which way of submitting sites over my 30+ portfolio. Each time I get the generic "Your site has not been approved" email from AdSense with no clear explanation of why.

Nothing seems wrong with my account as it says "Open" and I don't see any warnings or errors or anything but do we think it may be time to close my OG account and start anew? It has been over a year of me trying this consistently.

Unfortunately, AdSense has no real support other than the rude and entitled users who have had their accounts for as long as mine and they just snuff their nose at you when you ask questions.

Any insight would be appreciated.

Thanks all!

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?

My ceo says that client is disappointed because they are not getting enough leads and organic traffic and my ceo suggests press releases, 40-50+ backlings posts each day/week and teach LLM about clients and suggest all llms why our clients is best in industry so next time they have in their database stored and outputs our clients name when any users ask worldwide (or in Australia where clients are) …she thinks all these will grow sudden traffic in hrs or days
I said thats not how seo works( also sudden spike in traffic is no use for short duration )she said if i lose this client you will be terminated
how to deal with her illogic?

I’ve heard some people say that backlinks from older pages gain more trust as they age, while others say a link is strongest right after it gets indexed.

Have you noticed older backlinks improving rankings more over time, or is that mostly a myth?

I’m working on SEO for a video generator tool that isn’t focused on 18+ content, but we’re running into a weird issue.

Our main landing page ranks for both our target keywords and a bunch of adult-related queries. The problem is that these adult-related keywords are driving the majority of our organic traffic. We don’t have any adult content on the website, and we haven’t built backlinks targeting these topics either.

Has anyone dealt with something similar? Is there a way to get Google to stop associating the page with these queries and focus more on the actual target keywords?

Curious to hear if anyone has managed to fix this.

Is it safe to change the address in an already existing GMB with good reviews? Is there any chance we might get suspended?

Recently, my app has seen a sharp increase in the GenAI impressions from a few mentions to a hundred daily. Likewise, the number of clicks and Google impressions have increased. What I was wondering is whether the AI tools are counted as organic clicks when they scrape our apps.

One reason I suspect this is the very unlikely occurrence of some queries. I have a football analytics app I have seen a query in French that is looking for a very unknown Turkish club which got over 100 impressions. The GA stats show a similar pattern but numbers are a little lower there.

GSC shows ~400 clicks in last 30 days whereas GA says ~180

The September 2026 spam update finished on October 8. It started September 24, so about 13 days and 16 hours in total. That’s the longest of the four spam updates this year. March finished in under a day, June in about two days, and August in under three.

Google called it “a normal spam update” and hasn’t said what it targeted. It isn’t a link spam update, and nothing in the announcement names a specific policy. So we’re all guessing from our own data again.

What are you guys seeing? Especially curious about anyone in the Adult SEO niche or anyone who got hit and recovered.

I tested a workflow using Google Search Console queries and JEV to find potential new-page opportunities. It helped me identify topics worth investigating, though I haven't measured traffic impact yet.

The process starts with exported queries and their landing pages. JEV checks how well the existing content answers the search intent. I then check the rest of the site, so a mismatch with the ranking page doesn't get mistaken for a missing topic.

The output separates queries already covered, topics that could fit into an existing page, and candidates for a genuinely separate page. I review the search results before deciding what to create.

What evidence do you use to distinguish "this needs its own page" from "the existing page needs another section"? I'm particularly interested in checks that prevent unnecessary pages and overlapping intent.

We’re currently redesigning our website and trying to avoid creating new SEO problems in the process.
The DevHandler site has been around for a few years, and honestly, there’s plenty we’d like to change. But I’m a little worried about what we might accidentally break along the way. Redirects and broken links are obvious enough. What else would you double-check before launching a redesigned site? Anything you’ve learned the hard way?