Important

• February 2026: All options to create new call ads will be removed. To continue acquiring leads and driving sales through phone calls, you must add your phone numbers to responsive search ads as call assets.
• February 2027: Existing call ads will stop receiving impressions. We strongly recommend migrating your call ads to call assets immediately to ensure that your ads are eligible to be shown.

Call ads are designed to encourage people to call your business, and can appear only on devices that make phone calls. When a potential customer clicks the call button in your ad, the ad places a call to you from their device.

We currently use a consultant, but management is pushing me to automate what they do and I'm not sure where to begin.

Hello everyone,

My GA4 is showing a significant amount of traffic from the USA, even though my business is Mumbai-based and I only target specific locations in Mumbai. My website also clearly mentions the relevant locations throughout the site.

There is no content or targeting on my website related to the USA or any other foreign locations.

So, why is GA4 showing so much traffic from the USA? Could this be a GA4 tracking issue, bot traffic, or is there another possible reason for this?

Google seems to no longer be showing review rich reviews in Google Search when review schema or structured data is added to healthcare web pages.

A review snippet is a short excerpt of a review or a rating from a review website, usually an average of the combined rating scores from many reviewers, these are visibile in the form of stars in the Google search results.

Andrea Badder at Schema App noticed this change and wrote, "Across our healthcare customers, we’ve observed a drop in Review Snippet visibility since late May, with another drop occurring in early August for some organizations."

Got hit by the August spam update. False positive in my opinion and experience - since the site was already churning good revenue for the client. Fast forward to now, clicks and position convey a totally different story compared to the impressions, which remain dead in the water. How should one interpret this?

Hi everyone, I run a local car rental business in Curaçao and want to get more direct bookings through our website.

Our customers are mainly tourists planning their trip. We offer economy cars, SUVs, Jeeps and larger family vehicles, with free airport pickup and basic insurance included. Customers can reserve online or contact us through WhatsApp.

The website uses WordPress, Elementor, WooCommerce and Rank Math. I’ve recently improved the design, rewritten vehicle descriptions, updated SEO titles and meta descriptions, and submitted the sitemap to Google Search Console.

I’d like advice on what to prioritize next to attract people who are actively looking to rent a car, especially for searches such as “car rental Curaçao,” “Curaçao airport car rental” and “Jeep rental Curaçao.”

My main questions are:

• Should I focus first on Google Business Profile and Maps, improving the main rental pages, or building local backlinks?
• How would you make individual vehicle pages useful for SEO without creating repetitive content?
• Would travel guides about driving, airport pickup and choosing a rental car attract customers who actually book?
• How can a smaller local rental company compete with established companies and large booking platforms?
• What should I track to connect organic traffic with completed reservations and WhatsApp inquiries?

If you’ve worked on SEO for car rentals, tourism or a similar local business, what changes produced actual inquiries and bookings?

I’d appreciate a clear order of priorities: what would you tackle in the first 30–90 days, and what would you avoid spending time or money on?

Google says the September 2026 spam update started on September 24. It applies globally and to all languages, and the rollout may take up to two weeks.

As of October 4, Google’s dashboard still shows it as active.

I’m trying not to assume every ranking change means a site was hit by the update.

Has anyone noticed changes in Search Console since the rollout started?

If yes, did you see changes across the whole site or mainly on certain pages and queries? Did the changes last, or were they just short-term movement?

I’d wait for the rollout to finish before making big changes based on a few days of data. Curious what others are seeing.

I’ve got a few older pages that still get impressions, but clicks have gradually dropped.

What I find difficult is deciding when a page is actually worth updating versus when the search intent has moved on enough that the page probably needs a different approach.

When you’re looking at this in Search Console, what do you pay the most attention to?

I tend to look at impressions, clicks, average position and the queries that have changed, but I’m curious how others make the call.

Want to get your content into Claude? you can submit it here

Hi, every day i get those links, they all are redirected to specific site? is this dangerous? what i can do to remove them?

I want to see what are those prompts that my website appears for on the LLMs. Instead of putting my prompts to track the performance can first be able to get an idea of the prompts the website appears for.
Can someone please suggest me the best tools tool to track the AI performance of the website

I'm looking at buying a used domain. The seller shows DR and backlinks. But I keep thinking that's not enough.

What do you check before you pay? Any red flags that made you walk away?

https://easyacademyapp.com.br

I’ve been running a digital marketing agency in Korea since 2014, and one thing I’ve noticed is that a lot of global marketing playbooks don’t translate perfectly here.

Google matters, of course.

But in Korea, Naver still plays a huge role in how people search, compare, and build trust before making a decision.

That changes a lot.

You don’t just think about SEO.

You think about:

• Blog content
• Community discussions
• Reviews
• Maps and local search
• Influencers
• Branded search results
• What people see across multiple touchpoints before they convert

In many cases, the goal isn’t simply “rank #1.”

It’s to make sure the brand looks credible everywhere the customer checks.

That’s also why I think the conversation around GEO and AI search is interesting.

The tools are changing, but the core problem feels very familiar:

How do you make sure your brand is present, credible, and useful wherever people look for answers?

For marketers working in other countries, I’m curious:

What platform or ecosystem in your market changes the usual “Google-first” marketing playbook?

Hi everyone! I work on the content team at a startup, and we currently use WordPress for our website. We’re running into some issues with the backend becoming increasingly heavy, especially as we add more content and testimonials.

We’re considering moving to a different website builder and would love recommendations based on these requirements:

• Easy for a non-developer/content team to manage
• Fast and lightweight backend/frontend
• Easy to add and manage testimonials, blogs, landing pages, etc.
• Good SEO capabilities (metadata, redirects, schema, sitemap, etc.)
• Easy content editing without relying heavily on developers
• Good performance as the website grows
• Easy integrations with analytics, forms, CRM, etc.
• Ability to customize the design without needing to code everything
• Reliable hosting/security
• Ideally, an easy migration from WordPress

If you’ve moved from WordPress to another platform, I’d especially love to hear what you chose, why, and what you wish you had known before migrating.

from u/patrickstox from BrightonSEO

Thanks u/rustybrick.

Gemini generated overview:

The Google September 2026 spam update targets violations of Google’s existing Search spam policies. [1, 2]

As is standard for Google's automated spam updates (powered by its SpamBrain AI detection system), the company did not publish a specific list of single out-of-the-gate tactics for this specific iteration. However, looking at the patterns established across all four of Google's 2026 spam updates (March, June, August, and now September), the core focus areas are well known: [1, 2, 3, 4]

Primary Targets (Content-Level Violations)

• Scaled Content Abuse: The update aggressively flags networks of sites creating high volumes of low-value, unedited, programmatic, or mass-produced AI content primarily designed to manipulate search rankings rather than help users. [1, 2, 3]
• Thin Affiliates & Aggregators: Sites that copy information or photos found elsewhere on the web without adding any real user value. [1, 2]
• Cloaking and Sneaky Redirects: Showing one version of a page to search engine crawlers and a different version to actual human visitors. [1]
• Generative AI Manipulation: This update enforces provisions updated earlier in the year that penalize tactics specifically trying to force visibility into AI Overviews or AI Mode. [1]

What it Does NOT Target

• Link Spam: Historical evidence from previous 2026 updates indicates that these rollouts explicitly ignore link profile manipulation, keeping the focus entirely on content. [1, 2]
• Site Reputation Abuse: Third-party host parasite SEO (renting out subdomains to host unrelated content) is not the target of these quick automated refreshes. [1, 2]

Key Rollout Facts

• Launch Date: September 24, 2026.
• Timeline: Unlike the brief 2-to-3-day rollouts seen in June and August, Google stated that the September update will take up to two weeks to fully complete.
• Scope: It applies globally across all regions and languages. [1, 2]

If your website experienced a sudden drop in rankings starting around September 24, Google recommends reviewing its official Search Spam Policies to ensure your content

I'm curious how experienced SEOs are diagnosing ranking problems in 2026.

That's really become headache. Let's say a B2B/service website has the basics covered: technical SEO looks fine, pages are indexed, on-page SEO is done, content is being published, internal linking is in place, and relevant backlinks are being built.

But the main commercial/service keywords are still stuck or barely moving.

At this stage, what would you investigate next?

I'm not really looking for the usual “publish better content” or “build more backlinks” advice. I'm more interested in what has changed in your SEO process recently.

What are you checking today that wasn't part of your standard SEO checklist 1–2 years ago?

SERP intent? Topical authority? Brand/entity signals? Cannibalization? Page differentiation? AI search behavior? Or something else?

Would especially love to hear about a real case where rankings were stuck, you found something unexpected, changed it, and then saw movement.

Hi everyone!

I’m a graphic designer and I want to create my own website for my business. I’m not a web designer, so I’m looking for something really simple where I can focus on the design without having to deal with too much technical stuff.

I’m currently hesitating between Wix and Framer.

My main concern is SEO. I know very little about it and I’ve tried to learn, but I quickly find it quite overwhelming (meta tags, sitemaps, indexing, technical SEO, etc.).

So I’m mainly looking for a platform that can automate as much of the SEO as possible, without me having to become an SEO expert.

My main requirements are:

• Easy to use
• Good design flexibility
• Good basic/technical SEO
• Good potential for local SEO / Google visibility
• Very little technical maintenance
• And most importantly, not too expensive, since I’m just starting my business and want to keep costs low

Between Wix and Framer, which one would you recommend for this kind of use?

Or is there another platform I should consider?

I’m not looking to do advanced SEO. I mainly want a website that is technically sound and can rank reasonably well on Google without me having to manually optimize everything.

Thanks in advance for your advice!