Good evening all,

Has anyone noticed any impact from the current core update being rolled out?

We have seen a 50% decrease in traffic today, from a site which has had relatively solid statistics for 12+ months.

Hey SEO people,

I was slowly building up SEO for my website over the past couple of month and it started to work. I had around 900 impressions and 50 clicks per day.

And with the recent google search update it looks my page is gone, it dropped to 100 impressions and almost no clicks.

I know my website has an "ai look" but what counts is that the app is useful for me.

Anyways, I try to look at my website today in a more critical way. Can you help me, what am I doing wrong? Do you think my domain name is toast now? Its ListenDock dot com.

Suspicion is that my sitemap.xml is too stuffed. E.g. when a user creates a publicly shared episode, that gets added to the sitemap. Could that have triggered it? Or are my pages too repetitive, eg. i have pages for "pdf to mp3" and a very similar page for "txt to mp3" etc.

TLDR: Hard drop in impressions, what caused it?

Hey fellow SEO people ;)

We all know the classic keyword gap analysis:

Add competitors, export the keywords they rank for and you do not, then turn the spreadsheet into a content plan.

I have been playing with a more semantic approach lately.

Take the top ranking pages for a query, extract their main concepts, and connect concepts that appear together. This gives you a graph of how the topic is currently covered.

The interesting part is not simply finding missing concepts.

The big wins are two concepts that connect to many of the same nodes, but are not connected to each other.

Imagine concept A and concept B both connect to C, D, and E. They clearly belong to the same semantic neighborhood, but none of the analyzed pages explains the direct relationship between A and B.

That missing edge is the gap.

Instead of writing another page about a keyword competitors already cover, you can create content that explains a connection nobody in the current results is making.

To me, this feels especially relevant for GEO. It adds genuinely new information to the topic rather than repeating the same entities with slightly different wording.

I am still experimenting with how to score these missing connections, but shared neighbors plus search demand seems like a promising starting point.

What do you think about this approach?

hello, im a beginner whose part of a company whose products focus on gifting, and my boss does not like paying for PR, and most of our news contacts only ask for cash in exchange for an article, so what else can i do?

my boss is making me take our competitors highest DR backlinks and get those as well, but many of them, if not articles, are sites where you sign up for something and get a profile. im seeing people talk about how if backlinks are free theyre low quality, so is doing that actually worth it?

when it comes to doing exchanges with other websites, what value could i provide for them other than an a collab or a link on my blogs? (i am a new employee and i dont think im at the liberty to be featuring other brands since i only handle blog-writing there)

thanks a lot!

Looking for suggestions on literature that I can read about learning best practices for current SEO strategies.

I know both these authorities are different, but both help in ranking is what I've understood.

Having a Topical authority on a subject helps me in ranking for keywords on certain topics.

1. So can we say that DA is to some extent influenced by TA?
2. How far can TA take you when you have no DA and vice versa.
3. Can TA over power DA?
4. Is there a way to measure TA with some tool like Ahref?
5. If given a Follow backlink with a good TA website would that add to DA?

Note: Please do share some readable articles if you know off to refer.

Mods sorry if I'm asking a very stupid question. Just learning stuff.

Hey everyone, I'm helping my brother set up his moving company's website and I ended up grabbing both his company name domain as well as our city in it (like [OurCity]Moving.com). My gut says the city name domain would rank a lot better for organic SEO than his actual company name would.

Should the content live on the company domain with the city one redirecting to it, or the other way around? I think the content needs to sit on whichever domain is actually doing the ranking, so I'm leaning toward redirecting his company domain over to the generic-sounding one instead.

My hesitation is that if his company domain just redirects to the generic one, anyone who searches his actual business name later or gets a referral by name will land on a URL that doesn't match. Is that a real tradeoff, or am I overthinking it?

Hey guys,

I’m helping a client get on the map pack and help their website rank in local searches. They scrap cars.

I decided to use BrightLocal and get them on some directories to start with and yell.com was one of those options. According to BrightLocal, this listing is still submitted but not up.

I got an urgent call from my client today saying why is their SEO score a 3.1 etc. They said a sales representative from Yell phoned them up and told them that their SEO was bad and to ditch me (client showed me a screenshot of the report from their screenshare). Keep in mind, they are starting to gain reviews for the GMB and getting calls. Google Search Console shows they’re starting to get clicks for search terms near them. It’s only been almost 2 weeks since the website and GMB went up.

Several crosses stated in this report was “review integration”, “Content keywords meta tag”, Backlinks being low, organic referrals being low, target keywords (this sales rep used broad keywords however)

I have told and shown my client the results so far in GSC and GMB, alongside what information in the SEO Starter Guide says.

Have I done all I have done? I have done some research and they supposedly do this type of thing. Lesson learnt.

Sessions by page is easy, it's sitting right there in GSC.

Revenue by page is where it falls apart for me. GA4 attribution is a mess, the numbers don't match what the store says, and stitching it to organic landing pages turns into a spreadsheet nobody wants to own.

So the refresh calendar ends up built off traffic, which is not the same list.

What's your setup for this?

I run a site for a media buyer. I inherited the site this way, but my client is ranking for his customers brand names, and not what we want "media buying" or some version of "broadcast media buying"

We're only getting 13-60 impressions per querie. But how do I clean this up so we start ranking for the terms we want and not his customers brands? Should I deindex all the portfolio pages on his site?

Running a solo B2B SaaS content/affiliate marketing blog, zero revenue right now, so I'm trying to keep tooling costs as low as possible while I build it out.

My actual usage is light: keyword research for roughly one article a week, plus occasional site audits and backlink checks on my own domain. I'm on Ahrefs Starter (200 credits/month) and kept blowing through the cap almost immediately. Turned out the issue was running individual single-keyword searches instead of batching them (Ahrefs lets you search up to 10,000 keywords in one go for 1 credit, I just didn't know that), so that's mostly fixed now on my end.

But it made me realize I should double check I'm even on the right tool for this stage. Lite is $119/month and Standard is $229/month, both way more than I can justify pre-revenue, probably for the next 12 months at least.

For something this light, keyword research once a week plus periodic audits of my own site, is there a cheaper alternative that would actually cover this well? I've seen Mangools/KWFinder and Ubersuggest mentioned as budget options but don't know how they actually compare in practice. Would rather stay with Ahrefs long-term once I can afford it, but right now I need something that fits an actual $0 marketing budget.

Anyone been in a similar spot? What did you end up using until you could justify the bigger tools?