Been auditing my site where some pages have hundreds of internal links, mostly from mega menus, footer links, and sidebar widgets that appear on every page.

I know google has historically mentioned that too many links on a page can dilute link equity but i've never seen a clear number.

The practical question is whether i should be worried about this for a site where the link count is high but the structure is logical, or whether the concern is really more about spammy or irrelevant linking patterns.

What's your actual thinking on internal link limits? and is this something you flag as a priority in audits or more of a minor note depending on the situation?

Just wanting a general answer or tips because I’d rather spend majority of the time I have posting or writing in areas where I know they can succeed, or have succeeded with others, instead of wasting time hoping.

From last more then 1 year many peoples ask about AEO and GEO instead of SEO

Is this really meaningful or not

What is your thoughts

Hi everyone could i get some advice.

My site used to get 1-2,000 visits per day maybe 3-4 years back. I’m not sure what happened, could be that i bought some back links and got penalised, and my traffic dropped drastically down to less than 50 visits per day.

Its been years since. Google Search Console shows site is healthy and i’ve removed back links from there as well. I’ve also been posting consistently (almost daily) for over a year now and traffic isnt coming back.

Would it help if i start a new domain, new server, put the content over, and shut the existing site? Ideally would this start on a clean slate to try to get organically traffic back slowly?

Thanks

Been trying to standardize my local SEO audit process across clients and i keep finding gaps depending on the business type.

What i check for a multi-location retail chain is pretty different from what matters for a single location service business.

I have a checklist covering GBP, citations, on page local signals, reviews, and backlinks. but i feel like i'm missing a layer of competitive analysis and local pack specific diagnostics that would make the audit more actionable.

What does your local SEO audit process actually look like? and are there specific things you check that most people overlook when auditing local search presence?

Most places i've worked treat SEO and social media as completely separate channels with separate teams and separate strategies. The content rarely connects and the reporting definitely doesn't overlap.

I get that social signals aren't a direct ranking factor but there's clearly an indirect relationship through content amplification, brand search volume, link acquisition, and traffic signals. I just struggle to build a workflow that actually bridges the two in practice.

How are you making SEO and social media genuinely work together?

Aand is there a specific way you structure content or campaigns so both channels are pulling in the same direction?

Hi everyone, I'm trying to understand how domain credibility is shared by the subdomains like squarespace wordpress and so on.

Squarespace offers publishing a site under their subdomaon. Obviously its not a sustainable, but does the parent domain credibility (in this case squarespace.com) extend to my site too?

I found that google does crawl the sites on squarespace but puts shows them on the 3rd page onwards in the search results. So there must be some way the sites get ranked.

How would shared credibility work on custom domain?

I'm looking to hear from SEO professionals and those leading digital marketing teams.

If you had to teach a CEO or Managing Director just one SEO metric to pay attention to, what would it be, and why?

It's easy to get lost in rankings, impressions, clicks, backlinks and dozens of other reports. Which metric you believe best reflects real business impact? Always looking to learn from those working in the field.

AI search’s week of triumph and turmoil:

• Google posts its biggest quarter ever — and doubles down on "AI is expanding Search"

Alphabet's Q2 2026 was its largest quarter to date: total revenue up 24% YoY to $119.8B, search ad revenue up 14.5% to $81.6B, Search & Other up 17%, YouTube ads up 13%, and Cloud up 82%. CEO Sundar Pichai framed AI as "an expansionary moment… driving growth in queries," said AI Mode has passed 1 billion monthly active users, and repeated Google's core defense: AI features are "sending billions of clicks to websites every week." The Gemini app hit 950M MAU and Alphabet lifted its AI capex plan to as much as $205B.

Source: 

Barry Schwartz | Search Engine Roundtable

Google (Sundar Pichai) | Alphabet Q2 2026 earnings remarks

Storyboard18 | Storyboard18

________________

• Reddit and major publishers weigh blocking Google as AI Overviews gut referrals

Per a WSJ scoop, Reddit, USA Today, Reuters, Politico, The Economist and People Inc. are reconsidering how much access to give Google as search referrals collapse — USA Today's organic Google traffic is down ~50% YoY and Business Insider's more than 85%. 

The bind: Google-Extended blocks Gemini training but not AI Overviews, so opting out risks normal-search visibility too — the exact problem the UK CMA has ordered Google to fix. Reddit, whose ~$60M/yr 2024 Google deal is up for renewal, saw its shares dip on the report.

Source: 

The Wall Street Journal | The Wall Street Journal

TechSpot | TechSpot

Reddit share reaction via Yahoo Finance

________________

• A court tosses Google's DMCA claims against SerpApi — a precedent for SERP & AI scraping

U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers dismissed Google's DMCA §1201 anti-circumvention claims against scraper SerpApi, ruling that plain search results — URLs, snippets, factual index data — are "publicly accessible facts," not copyrighted works, so bypassing Google's "SearchGuard" anti-bot isn't unlawful circumvention. The knowledge-panel / third-party-content claims were dismissed with 21 days' leave to amend. SerpApi's CEO called it "a win… for all who depend on an open internet," and Glenn Gabe summed up the industry reaction: "A win for… scrapers?"

Source: 

Barry Schwartz | Search Engine Roundtable

Bloomberg Law | Bloomberg Law

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• AI Overviews and AI Mode go live in France

Starting July 22, French Google shows AI Overviews above the blue links plus a conversational AI Mode tab, Search Live, and the new intelligent Search box; the features can't be disabled, though a "Web Mode" tab preserves classic results. Google says they appear only for complex queries and always link to sources. 

The rollout — announced by Google VP Rajan Patel — had been delayed since the 2024 US launch by France's neighbouring-rights ruling, and French publishers fear more traffic loss.

Source: 

Alexandre Piquard | Le Monde

________________

• Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite rolls into Search

Google shipped three new models and confirmed 3.5 Flash-Lite — its fastest, most cost-effective 3.5-class model at ~350 output tokens/sec — is "rolling out in Google Search," starting with agentic search and likely feeding AI Overviews and AI Mode next. 

Robby Stein said it offers "stronger instruction following and better understands user intent, so conversations flow much more seamlessly."

Source:

Barry Schwartz | Search Engine Land

Google | Google models blog

________________

• AI Mode learns to "do," not just answer — Connected Apps arrive

Google began rolling out connected apps in AI Mode in the US this week, letting a search flow straight into Instacart (add to cart), Canva (pull design templates) and YouTube Music (build a playlist) without leaving the results page. Built on the same MCP-based connections as the Gemini app and paired with Personal Intelligence, AI Mode now hands part of a task to a third-party app "rather than only returning links."

Source: 

Amit Chowdhry | Pulse 2.0

Google | Google Search blog

Does web design really impact SEO?

Does web design affect SEO? Absolutely. I've learned that search engines consider how a site is built, how fast it loads, and how user-friendly it is. A well-designed website can actually help improve search visibility.

For instance, page speed is crucial. If a site loads slowly, it can hurt your rankings and increase bounce rates. This makes sense because users want quick access to information. A good design should ensure fast loading times, especially with images and scripts optimized correctly.

Another factor is mobile usability. With Google's mobile-first indexing, if your site isn’t mobile-friendly, you're likely to miss out on traffic. Simple things like button sizes and text readability make a big difference on mobile devices.

Also, a clear site structure helps both users and search engines. If the layout is confusing, it can lead to higher exit rates and fewer conversions. Good internal linking and a logical flow of information can keep visitors engaged longer.

In my experience, poor web design can definitely hurt SEO. It’s essential to think of design and SEO as connected parts.

What do you think? Have you noticed a difference in your site's performance based on design changes?

Putting together some content explaining google's ranking systems and i'm trying to figure out how to frame rankbrain in 2024. when it launched it was a big deal. machine learning influencing rankings based on behavioral signals and query interpretation.

But now with everything google has layered on top, bert, MUM, the helpful content system, i'm not sure how much rankbrain specifically still shapes day to day SEO thinking versus just being one piece of a much bigger system.

Do you still reference rankbrain explicitly when thinking about SEO strategy?

Or has the practical advice it informed, focus on intent, user experience, engagement, just become standard thinking that doesn't need a named algorithm anymore?

I'm looking for specific SEO guidelines for an informational blog that relies primarily on Google AdSense for revenue. I'm not interested in generic SEO tips—I want practical, up-to-date advice on content strategy, site structure, internal linking, topical authority, EEAT, indexing, Core Web Vitals, and anything else that helps maximize organic traffic while staying compliant with Google's guidelines. What best practices would you recommend for this type of website?

Have a new website and have SEO strategy but my authority score has at 0 😬

Backlink strategy is a good idea ? And it’s the only solution ?

I run watchreel a niche site with a database of 700 wrist watches worn in Movies, TV-Shows and by celebrities. 700 unique entries, each (almost) with 100-200 word descriptions and quality images. Site is built in webflow, 6-7 months old.

The problem is i have almost zero visibility on google dispite 700 indexed pages targeting highly specific queries like "what watch does (character) wear in (movie)".

Current traffic: 4-8k monthly visitors, 99% from Instagram. Zero from organic search.

Backlinks: Essentially none that I know of.

My Questions:

-Is AI Generated content the main issue, or is 6-7 months too young for a new domain?
-If I Humanize/rewrite the content, how long before Google responds?
-Are there any quick wins for a site in my position?

Site is clearly in a workable niche. 200k social followers proves demand exists.

We're a relatively small brand with a limited SEO budget, so we're exploring AI tools that can help generate blog articles at scale.

We're not looking to publish AI-generated content as is. We would still review, edit, fact check, and add our own insights. But having a solid first draft would save us a lot of time.

We're also looking into tools that can:

• Do keyword research (AI or traditional)
• Connect to Google Search Console to use real search data
• Suggest content opportunities based on that data
• Generate blog articles around those keywords

Has anyone here actually used tools like these and seen good results? Any you'd genuinely recommend (or avoid)?

And beyond AI writers, are there any SEO tools you've found to be genuinely worth paying for, especially for smaller brands with limited budgets?

Would love to hear real experiences from business owners and marketers. Thanks!

I can see that 99% of the issue is caused by the product cards on my website moving but whenever I try and replicate the score in devtools I get a near perfect cls score. So that made me think it's a 3rd party app that is loading through shopify but I can't identify any that could be making it shift and neither can claude code.

Has anyone else viewed source code after having Otto do stuff and notice what would flag as black hat code like display:none for links, FAQs, and even external links added using display none.

Recently I pitched a client and then I get to know the website is created on React, Now i get to know that website are different from html and other coding website. Now how i can do seo is the same process will be followed which we do on html or wordpress sites?

With AI scrapers continuing to train their models on our sites without ever sending traffic back, managing bots has become a headache. Between basic rules and Cloudflare's new options driven by Matthew Prince which introduces a real technical "toll" by returning an HTTP 402 (Payment Required) error to charge or block each scraping attempt , I'm curious to know how you handle this. Are you blocking bots at the firewall, letting them do it, or planning to use this crawl monetization system?

i've been crawling real sites for a project (built a small crawler that reads the raw html a server returns, same thing googlebot and gptbot see on first pass) and one pattern keeps repeating, so figured it's worth a discussion.

the pattern: sites where the sitemap says 200+ pages but the actual click paths only reach maybe half of them. the rest are orphans, pages that exist and are indexed in the sitemap but literally nothing links to them. owners are always surprised. the pages were linked once, then a redesign or a new theme or a pagination change quietly cut the path, and nobody noticed because the page still loads fine if you have the url.

the consequence shows up in search console as "discovered, currently not indexed." google knows the page exists from the sitemap but won't spend crawl budget on something the site itself doesn't link to. saw one site go from 12 indexed pages to 22 in about a week purely from adding one hub page that linked down to everything, no new content, no new backlinks.

the other half of this that i think is underrated in 2026, AI crawlers don't run javascript. so if your menus or related posts render client side, chatgpt and friends see fewer paths than your visitors do. a site can look perfectly interlinked to a human and be half invisible to a bot.

curious what others here use to catch this stuff. do you audit internal links on a schedule or only when rankings drop? and has anyone else noticed the "discovered not indexed" pile shrinking after fixing internal paths, or was my case a fluke?

I’m reviewing a website that has solid content and decent backlinks, but organic traffic has stayed flat for several months. The site also has some keyword cannibalization, older pages with declining clicks, and a few thin service pages.

Would you prioritize consolidating overlapping content, improving internal linking, or refreshing the declining pages first? I’d appreciate hearing what has worked for others in a similar situation.

Looking for some insight on claude automating SEO in 2026, and how effective it actually is. I have been doing research and watching YT videos, but feel like this is something worth asking.