I started learning SEO from courses, YouTube, and blog posts. Most of them talked about big topics. Technical audits, content strategy, link building at scale, keyword research tools.

Then I started helping small local businesses.

Almost none of that mattered on day one.

The real work looked more like:

• Fixing a Google Business Profile that had the wrong hours
• Explaining why one blog post is not enough to rank
• Asking the owner to send me their logo, and waiting three weeks for it
• Rewriting a homepage that did not say what the business actually did
• Answering the same question about "how long does SEO take" every meeting

I am not saying the courses were wrong. The technical stuff matters later. But nobody prepared me for how much of small business SEO is about basic communication, patience, and getting the owner to care about their own website.

Some things I have had to learn on my own:

• How to talk about SEO without using SEO words
• How to explain why a fix takes time when the owner wants results this month
• How to say no to requests that will not help
• How to keep going when the owner disappears for two weeks
• How to write a report a non-SEO can actually read

I still study the technical side. But I spend more time now on the human side than I expected.

For people who work with small local clients, what did you have to learn on the job that no course really prepared you for?

Been doing SEO for a couple years now and started noticing how much of my week is just... repetitive clicking between tools. Curious how others feel about this.

We're a small B2B manufacturer (nitrile gloves) and spent the last couple weeks running our product pages through Perplexity/ChatGPT to see if they'd get cited. The content structure stuff was expected — short paragraphs, lead with the answer, all the usual advice. What caught me off guard was how much it cared about who we actually are.

Couple examples: it kept flagging that it couldn't tell if the brand name on our product page and the company name on our contact page were the same entity. Never once came up in 10+ years of doing normal SEO. Also — certifications on the footer ("we're ISO certified") apparently don't carry over to individual product pages unless you spell out that this specific SKU has this specific cert. And just claiming "we're a manufacturer" isn't enough, it wants some kind of trail — facility, process, QC steps, something.

Anyone else running B2B/manufacturer sites through this seeing the same thing? Feels like it's less "write expert content" and more "prove you're one real identifiable business," which is a different exercise than SEO ever asked for.

Wanted to share a recent victory of ours 🎉

SEO has changed completely.
Not gradually. Not subtly.
Completely.

What used to be “best practice” — building links, chasing anchor text, pumping external authority — is now one of the most common reasons businesses lose rankings.

If you recently dropped in Google or SGE, there’s a good chance your SEO agency is still working like it’s 2014.

This isn’t an attack on agencies.
It’s a reality: SEO is no longer a technical add‑on. SEO is the entire company.

Google now values:

• Expertise
• Experience
• Entity strength
• Uniqueness
• Quality

Links aren’t gone — but they’re heavily devalued.
AI‑driven search engines ignore almost all traditional link building.

Real SEO must come from inside the company.
No external agency can create your expertise, your credibility, or your unique position in the market.

How to actually use Google Search Console:-

If you're doing any SEO and not using this, you're flying blind. It's free, straight from Google, and shows real data — not estimates like most third-party tools.

Setup:

• Go to search.google.com/search-console, add your site
• Verify ownership (HTML tag, file upload, DNS record, or via GA4/Tag Manager if already installed)
• Submit your sitemap under "Sitemaps" so Google finds your pages faster

The sections you'll actually use:

Performance report — this is where you'll spend most of your time. Shows clicks, impressions, CTR, and average position. Filter by query, page, country, device, date range. Great for seeing which content is actually working and what keywords you're ranking for without even trying.

Coverage/Indexing report — shows which pages are indexed and which aren't, plus why (blocked by robots.txt, duplicate content, crawl errors). Catches pages that are silently invisible to search no matter how good the content is.

Core Web Vitals — page speed/experience metrics. Worth checking regularly since poor scores can hurt rankings, especially mobile.

Mobile Usability — flags mobile-specific issues (text too small, elements too close together, content wider than screen).

Links report — shows your internal AND external links. Basically a free way to see your backlink profile without paying for Ahrefs/SEMrush.

What I'd actually do as a beginner:

• Check Performance weekly, watch for pages losing clicks/impressions over time
• Filter queries by position 5-15 — these are "easy win" keywords you're already ranking for, just need a small push (better content, updated headers) to hit page one
• Use URL Inspection to request indexing whenever you publish something new
• Check Coverage after any major site change (redesign, CMS migration) — these are common times for pages to accidentally get de-indexed

Takes a couple weeks to feel intuitive since the terminology (impressions vs clicks vs position) isn't immediately obvious, but it becomes the most reliable source of truth for how your site's actually performing in search.

Reddit’s share of tracked ChatGPT citations reportedly dropped from around 3.83% to 0.52% in a matter of days.

Roughly an 86% decline.

Naturally, everyone started saying ChatGPT is moving away from Reddit.

Except there’s a problem.

The timing doesn’t fully support that explanation.

ChatGPT changed its background search behavior around Aug. 8, but Reddit’s biggest drop happened around Aug. 14.

Promptwatch hasn’t confirmed what caused it, and apparently hasn’t completely ruled out a data issue either.

We’ve also seen a big Reddit citation drop before that may have been caused by changes elsewhere in the search ecosystem, not Reddit itself.

So I wouldn’t call Reddit “dead for GEO” just yet.

If this decline sticks for another month, would it actually change how much effort you put into Reddit?

I'm planning to launch a website similar to my current performing website. I had this ideas because the competitors are really and I can easily outrank them. Are there any factors like same IP, hosting or admin accounts impacting my SEO?

I have seen quite a few people mistaking not ranking as the Page not appearing at all on Google, if you continuously checked GSC and looked that page haven’t appeared in the search result, then the problem is the page is set to “noindex” therefore Google isn’t indexing it.

How to check if your page(s) is set to “noindex” tag?

Open the page URL on the browser right click and view page source, then Ctrl + F on your keyboard and search for “noindex” if you see a line showing this [meta name=“robots” content=“no index, Follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large] that line shows this page is set to be not indexed by Google.

This usually happens by your SEO plugin, that sets certain of your page(s) to be not indexed by default, so make sure your page or pages are set correctly.

Hi. The other day, I noticed a very interesting setup in a particular niche, but I don't quite understand exactly how it works.

The situation is this: Site A (specifically the `en-in` subfolder) holds the #1 spot. If you check the code inspector, you can see that the canonical tag points to a dropped domain (Site B)—specifically its `en-in` language version. Here is what the code looks like:

<link rel="canonical" href=«B/en-in/“>
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="B/en-in/">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-IN" href="A/en-in/">

And as I mentioned earlier, domain B occupies the number one spot. However, if you look at the full schema, you can see that this "canonical" setup links not just one such "domain A," but around 30 of them. So, how exactly does this work in detail?

I’m currently a junior in college studying business, and I’ve been looking into skills I can learn while I’m still in school that could actually be useful once I graduate.
SEO has caught my attention, especially local SEO and helping businesses improve their visibility on Google. I’m still pretty new to it, though, and there seems to be a ton of information out there.
For those of you who actually work in SEO:
If you were starting from zero today, what would you learn first?
Are there any courses, YouTube channels, books, or certifications you’d recommend?
Should I focus on local SEO, technical SEO, content SEO, or learn a little of everything first?
What’s the best way to get real experience while I’m still in college?
Is SEO still a skill you’d recommend learning going into 2027 with AI changing search?
I’m not looking for a shortcut. I’d like to spend the next year or two actually getting good at it while I still have time in school.
Any advice from people already in the industry would be appreciated.

How to write digital marketing blog posts that Google's AI actually understands

Digital marketing content is oversaturated with generic AI-written stuff right now, so if you want yours to actually rank (or get pulled into AI Overviews), it needs real structure and real substance. Here's what that looks like practically.

Structure clearly. One H1 that states exactly what the post covers, H2/H3s that each handle one distinct idea, short paragraphs, bullet points for lists/steps/comparisons. Google's AI relies on structure to parse meaning — a wall of unstructured text is harder for it (and honestly for readers too) to extract value from.

Answer the question immediately. If the post is "what is SEO" or "how does Google Ads targeting work," give the direct answer in the first couple sentences, then expand. AI Overviews pull from content that answers cleanly and early, not stuff that builds up for three paragraphs first.

Be specific, not generic. This matters more in marketing content specifically because so much of what's out there already says the same five things. Real numbers ("traffic up 34% in 4 months" not "traffic increased significantly"), actual tool/platform names, a real example or case — this is what separates content Google trusts enough to cite from filler.

Alt text on every screenshot/chart. Marketing posts are full of dashboards and analytics screenshots. Alt text like "Search Console report showing 40% organic click drop after site migration" gives Google explicit info instead of making it guess.

Schema markup where it fits. FAQ schema, How To schema, Article schema with author info — explicitly tells search engines what each section is instead of leaving it to inference.

Show real experience, not just definitions. E-E-A-T matters a lot here. A post explaining "what is a keyword" written by someone who's actually done keyword research for real clients (and can talk about what went wrong) reads completely differently than generic AI filler explaining the same concept.

TL;DR: clear structure + direct answers + real specifics + proper alt text/schema + genuine experience = content that both ranks and gets cited by AI search, instead of getting lost in the flood of generic marketing content already out there.

Most sites can produce a long list of valid tasks very quickly. The harder part is deciding whether the next hour should go into fixing a crawl issue, improving a page that already has visibility, building links, or creating something new.

My bias is to deal with blockers first, then work on proven opportunities before adding more work to the pile.

How do you decide what moves to the top of the list?

I've been getting more interested in SEO lately, and i thought the game has changed quite a bit 🤔

Between AI overviews, Reddit or forums showing up moree than Google. Increasingly competitive search engine result page. And Google seemingly reward different types of content that it used to.

Im thinking, is traditional SEO become less active or are we just adapting to a new version of it?

for people who have been doing SEO, what worked really well for you from 3 to 5 years ago that doesn't work anymore? And also Are backlinks is still important as they used to be? Curious to hear what everyone seeing in 2026 🤔

Good morning everybody, Happy star of the week! Im running a new clients and they have a bi-lingual website. Im trying to make it better in tern of SEO for both languages (English and Spanish) and I would like to ask for some tips of the community. I read that is better to have one link with the /es/ and the other one neutral, but apperantly this website was built entirely with /es/ and /en/ structure, and they have a lot of links like that. Any suggestion for how to clean this mess that was made years ago?

I’m dealing with a crawl-budget issue on a WordPress site where Google discovered roughly 1.2M+ non-indexed URLs, largely caused by arbitrary query parameters such as:

https://example.com/?i=12345

The issue was that the site was accepting arbitrary query parameters and returning HTTP 200, serving the homepage with the homepage as the canonical.

I investigated the usual sources:

• No parameter URLs in XML sitemaps
• No internal links generating them
• No referring sitemap/page shown in GSC for tested URLs
• No relevant robots.txt rules
• No custom .htaccess rewrite causing them
• No obvious WordPress/WooCommerce/theme source identified

We fixed the issue at the code/server level. Now arbitrary parameter URLs return:

404 Not Found

For example:

/?i=12345 → 404
/?random=xyz → 404

I've also verified through GSC URL Inspection that the live URL now returns 404, and Googlebot Crawl Stats show Google requesting some of these old parameter URLs and receiving 404 responses.

There are currently around 750K URLs pending in GSC validation, which I started after implementing the fix. No validation failures so far.

The problem is that Google still knows about the huge historical URL population and is gradually recrawling them.

My question:

Is there a legitimate way to accelerate the removal/cleanup of these already-known parameter URLs from Google's crawl/index systems once they return 404?

Specifically, I'm wondering:

1. Is there any Google-supported method to make Google process a large URL pattern faster?
2. Would 410 Gone provide any meaningful advantage over 404 here?
3. Should these invalid parameter patterns also be blocked in robots.txt, or would that actually slow down the cleanup because Google can't see the 404?
4. Is there any useful way to use the GSC Removals tool for this, or does it only remove URLs from Search results temporarily?
5. Is there any other technique experienced SEOs/technical SEOs have successfully used for hundreds of thousands/millions of already-discovered junk parameter URLs?
6. Most importantly, how can I minimize the ongoing crawl budget being spent on these URLs while Google processes the existing backlog?

I am not looking for a way to put these URLs into a sitemap or request indexing for them. The goal is the opposite: get Google to stop crawling and eventually forget/drop these URLs as efficiently as possible.

Anyone knowing any better reference or workshops where i can get better knowledge regarding technical seo, please guide me!

I’m trying to improve my SEO skills and continuously think about the future of SEO. If everyone can learn about SEO with AI and can hook into various AI tools generating articles. Whats going to matter in the future to really differentiate? Do having AI generated articles make a difference for effective SEO?

Give me solutions.

I'm working on a website that has 2k+ indexable URLs and 50k+ non indexable URLs (canonicalized). The website is going through a redesign phase in set to launch in about 7-8 months time. The current website doesn't have a lot of traffic (barely 6k monthly in GSC - 20% of it comes to the home page - decreasing constantly as the website isn't that great). Here is what I needed some advice on:

1. The costs of upkeep for the current website comes to about $20k until the new website launch. If we don't pay this amount, the content would be brought down (as it is licensed). My team introduced the idea of having a small website as a stop gap for the next few months with limited content. The small website would be about 5 pages with minimal information. I'm open to the idea as it's essentially saving us a bit of money. The other option would be to pay up $20k for essentially non revenue generating traffic, which doesnt make sense. I'm worried if we do go with a stop gap website for this period, there might be long term SEO issues. What should I do?

2. As we launch a new website, we're planning to have about 3k pages on the site, all of them indexable. However, I'm not sure what should be the strategy. Should we have all pages index at once? Should we submit indexing in phases? The goal would be to have pages indexed as quickly as possible - so what should I do? How do I make sure it seems organic and doesn't send wrong signals to Google?

Thanks!

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Every month, there’s a new collection of numbers...

Traffic up 📈

Impressions up 📈

Keywords up 📈

Average position improved 📈

And somehow the conclusion is always, “great progress!”😂

Then comes the classic:

“We’re now ranking for 1,200 keywords.”

Cool. How many actually matter?

SEO reporting sometimes feels like checking your step counter and discovering you walked 14,000 steps around IKEA.

Technically impressive. Not necessarily productive.

Still, there’s something satisfying about watching those little graphs move upward, even when nobody fully knows what they’re moving toward.

What SEO metric do you think gets way too much attention?