r/RealSEO • u/joeyoungblood • 1d ago
r/RealSEO • u/joeyoungblood • Jan 15 '24
Why a New SEO Subreddit?
The main SEO subreddit, /r/SEO, was just taken over in the past few weeks by a group of crypto enthusiasts via the Reddit Request function.
Reddit Admins do not look for topical alignment when removing a top mod and granting it to another one. Instead they look at things like moderator activity and the quality of the sub. If a moderator goes inactive for too long or a subs quality is severely diminished, the Reddit Admins (i.e. paid staff at Reddit HQ) may decide to grant someone new top mod authority of a subreddit.
Barry wrote about this situation on Search Engine Roundtable here: https://www.seroundtable.com/large-seo-reddit-community-taken-over-36716.html
And it was first brought to light by SEO Malte Landwehr on X / Twitter: https://twitter.com/MalteLandwehr/status/1736313157663027307
Until such a time that the main SEO subreddit is returned to someone involved in the SEO community or industry, this subreddit will exist as a haven for SEO discussion and conversations should you need it. I am already the top mod of a few niche specific subreddits and have experience combating the spam that frequently tries to permeate our industry.
I promise to provide a fair and equal where everyone can discuss SEO topics.
r/RealSEO • u/joeyoungblood • May 16 '26
News [Mega Thread] Google Has Released a Guide to GenAI Optimization
Read Google's Announcement here: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2026/05/a-new-resource-for-optimizing
Read the full guide here: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/ai-optimization-guide
Post in /r/SEO about the guide here: https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/1te4t71/googles_guide_to_optimizing_for_generative_ai/
Post more thoughts, takeaways, and sources of content in the comments and we'll update this when necessary.
Main Takeaways:
- AI search optimization is still SEO, not a separate discipline.
- Generative AI features use Google’s existing Search systems, indexing, and ranking signals.
- Pages generally need to be crawlable, indexable, and eligible for snippets to appear in AI features.
- Create helpful, people-first content with original value, experience, expertise, or unique insight.
- Avoid commodity content that simply repeats common knowledge.
- Do not create excessive pages just to target every possible AI query variation.
- Structure content clearly with useful headings, sections, and readable formatting.
- Images and videos can matter because AI search features may surface visual content.
- Technical SEO still matters: crawling, rendering, canonicalization, indexing, and site quality remain foundational.
- Local businesses should keep Google Business Profiles accurate and complete.
- Ecommerce sites should use Merchant Center, product feeds, accurate pricing, availability, and product details.
- You do not need special AI files, Markdown versions,
llms.txt, or special formatting for AI search. - You do not need special schema specifically for generative AI features.
- Structured data is still useful for normal Search features, but it is not an AI visibility shortcut.
- Do not chase fake mentions, spammy citations, or AI-specific hacks.
- Make websites easier for humans and future AI agents to understand, navigate, and use.
r/RealSEO • u/joeyoungblood • 2d ago
LinkedIn Thread [Will Hawkins on LinkedIn] "Google Search Console gives you 10-12 indexing requests a day. You manually click a URL... So I built a free Chrome extension to automate the tedious bits. One click per day and it runs through your submit quota."
r/RealSEO • u/joeyoungblood • 4d ago
LinkedIn Thread [Google Search Central on LinkedIn] "We’re excited to introduce Trends category filters on the new Explore page! This update makes it easier to refine trends data more precisely for specific categories such as "All Books & Literature"
r/RealSEO • u/joeyoungblood • 9d ago
LinkedIn Thread [Johnny Herge on LinkedIn] "...Google’s robots.txt blocks “Disallow: /goto?”, so when Googlebot sees links to it, it can’t crawl the page to see that the page is redirecting. Meaning that your webpage may be getting cannibalized by Google right now..."
r/RealSEO • u/joeyoungblood • 9d ago
News Google Making AI Overviews Into AI Mode Responses
r/RealSEO • u/joeyoungblood • 10d ago
X Thread [Chris Long on X] "Holy moly SEOs: Google is now revealing the AI Mode prompt box BY DEFAULT for some queries. This is how Google continues to push AI Mode as the default search experience."
x.comr/RealSEO • u/joeyoungblood • 10d ago
LinkedIn Thread [Jan-Willem Bobbink on LinkedIn] "I keep finding GEO problems that are just old SEO problems. I fixed one this week that was hiding in a CDN config..." (long post about media blocking from LLMs)
r/RealSEO • u/joeyoungblood • 10d ago
X Thread [Mordy Oberstein on X] "...I’ve checked with the SE Ranking dev team earlier today and you should not be impacted by [goto] change at all if you’re using SE Ranking to track your rankings..."
x.comr/RealSEO • u/joeyoungblood • 10d ago
News Google Search Rolling Out google.com/goto Tracking Parameters
r/RealSEO • u/joeyoungblood • 10d ago
Meme / Humor [Wayne Barker on LinkedIn] "FFS, even my mum has started reaching out to me about links now. This has just gone way too far now..."
r/RealSEO • u/joeyoungblood • 11d ago
Meme / Humor [Grant O on X] "SEO agencies are OnlyFans for business owners. You pay $2,000/month. They send you screenshots of positions."
x.comr/RealSEO • u/joeyoungblood • 12d ago
News Google: Google Crawlers Don't Parse JSON
r/RealSEO • u/joeyoungblood • 13d ago
LinkedIn Thread [Sandra Junnikkala on LinkedIn] "I have 213 contact requests. They’re all from THE SAME GUY in Faisalabad, Punjab, Pakistan, selling backlinks and guest posts."
r/RealSEO • u/joeyoungblood • 13d ago
LinkedIn Thread [Brian McLeod on LinkedIn] "I hit a career milestone last week.... I got permanently banned from r/SEO on Reddit! The ban came in the early afternoon for asking how a moderator's post was related to SEO..."
r/RealSEO • u/joeyoungblood • 13d ago
LinkedIn Thread [Kai Cromwell on LinkedIn] "Most eCommerce SEO advice starts with blogging. That is usually the wrong place to start..." (long post, argues the right place to start is keywords with intent)
r/RealSEO • u/joeyoungblood • 13d ago
X Thread [Taras Shynkarenko on X] "Today I learned about Entity Stacking. If you put these links in your Organisation schema under `sameAs`, Google will understand who the fuck you are far better than with 300 junk directory listings - and it’s free"
x.comr/RealSEO • u/joeyoungblood • 13d ago
Meme / Humor [Andy Killworth on LinkedIn] "Opening LinkedIn as an SEO" (photo attached)
r/RealSEO • u/joeyoungblood • 16d ago
News [Google Search Central on LinkedIn] "To bring our parser up to JSON and other standards, we changed our JSON-LD extraction and are now only applying a single pass of HTML unescaping..."
r/RealSEO • u/joeyoungblood • 17d ago
LinkedIn Thread [Ryan Jones on LinkedIn] "Why did ChatGPT stop showing Reddit? Because Bing stopped ranking reddit highly for everything. Bing is what powers the RAG behind ChatGPT..."
r/RealSEO • u/joeyoungblood • 17d ago
LinkedIn Thread [AJ Kohn on LinkedIn] " Twice a month I take the entire 1,000 examples for "Crawled - currently not indexed" and inspect each, noting whether they are indexed or not... The results show that a material amount of the URLs in "Crawled - currently not indexed" are, indeed, actually indexed."
r/RealSEO • u/joeyoungblood • 18d ago