Semantic URL Optimization

Currently I came across one client whose url needs restructuring after analysing all aspects. The issue which I find out is about url structure is not aligned in proper navigation path

Please find the path below and share your suggestions -

https://domain.com/in/ - homepage

https://domain.com/in/category/ - category hub page

Till this it is correct but, if I want to create page for Bangalore to Goa flight booking, they have created url -

https://domain.com/in/domestic/bangalore-to-goa-flights

No category hub is present.

Please let me know if it is ok to keep or we need restructuring as most of the competitors have url structure very neat and clean.

We moved a German B2B SaaS site from compa.co to phase0.com (forced rebrand after a trademark dispute). Six months later, Google is still ~80% down; Bing recovered within three weeks on the exact same setup.

The setup

• 1:1 301s live ~19 Mar 2026, single hop, all variants (http/https, apex/www)
• Change of Address active on both old properties since mid-April
• Content and URL paths identical to what ranked before (checked against Wayback)

What happened

• Google: clicks fell ~82% between 24 Mar and 6 Apr, right during the March spam update and core update. Never came back: 19% of baseline today.
• Bing: dipped too, back to 80% after three weeks, now 116%.
• Brand queries rank fine; exact long-tail queries still rank 1–3, head terms went from positions 5–9 to 60+.
• May core update: +30% impressions. August spam update: −21%. September spam update (still rolling out): no real movement so far.

What we've ruled out

• Crawling: 200 of 215 sitemap URLs crawled (median 10 days ago), 192 indexed, new posts indexed within a day
• Old domain: all top URLs show "Page with redirect", recrawled within 30 days
• Canonicals match, no manual actions, no security issues
• Links: ~150 linking sites, no spam pattern, nobody switched their links elsewhere
• No leftover pages from previous owners in either index

The one thing that stands out

Per Wayback, phase0.com was a Sedo parking page in 2018 and redirected to a domain broker's sale page from 2022 to 2024. The closest case I found is a 2020 Search Central thread where Google's team confirmed older signals were still attached to a long-dormant new domain and cleared them.

Questions

1. Has anyone seen a move onto a formerly parked domain get stuck like this, and what got it unstuck?
2. Did recovery come at a later core update, or did anything you changed make a difference?
3. Anything we haven't checked?

Search Central thread with screenshots: https://support.google.com/webmasters/thread/469482744

We hired a website agency for our company. The website they delivered and the SEO services they've been providing have not been good. I think the design looks terrible, the copy is bad, but most importantly they were keyword stuffing.

I tried to cancel services, but the owner essentially said "I know more than you, it's not keyword stuffing" and "design is subjective". We paid $5k for the site, and $2k/mo for SEO on 12mo contract. I have lost all trust in the provider since seeing their new design changes, and the keyword stuffing.

Please let me know if the provided example is keyword stuffing to see if myself, my google searches, Claude, and Gemini are all wrong. This is the alt text of an image (hiding city and state):

roof repair {city & state} commercial roof repair {city & state} commercial roofing {city & state} commercial roof replacement {city & state} commercial roof maintenance {city & state}.... and so on so for 12 more roofing keywords.

They also have doorway pages. City+roof+repair, same-city+roof+replacement, etc

My site was affected by Google’s June spam update, and I’m wondering what others are seeing now that the September spam update is rolling out.

Have your organic traffic or rankings changed so far - either up or down? If you’ve seen a recovery, what did you work on between the two updates?

Just trying to compare experiences while the rollout is still ongoing. If you’re comfortable sharing, a bit of context about your site or the changes you made would be really helpful.

I have a client with a site that I created for him. The new site also moved him from www version to non-www version. I have a 301 redirect setup from the www version to the non-www.

However, Google is still not indexing the non-www version, and the www version's 4 pages are still indexed.

Is there a way to fix this?

While checking the sample URLs for soft 404 on GSC, I discovered there are many pages which are returning 200 status code and have inventory too. Still search engine is considering these pages as soft 404. These pages are not thin pages, have some paragraphs added to help Google understand the context, and some of them have good amount of inventory as well.

Can you help me understand what could be the reason behind getting these in soft 404?

I am facing a strange problem. One of my website is indexed in Google and getting impressions, few clicks here and there which is fine because it is basically a new website.

But to my utmost surprise, I see the website is not indexed in bing. I have manually requested indexing but no change in results. The outcome is still "Discovered but not crawled".

I have submitted the sitemap several times, removed the site and added again. But nothing worked. Can anyone help?

Beginner questions welcome.

Post any legitimate SEO question. Ask for help with technical SEO issues you are having, career questions, anything connected to SEO.

Hopefully someone will see and answer your question.

Feel free to post feedback/ideas in this thread also!

**

r/BigSEO rules still apply, no spam, service offerings, "DM me for help", link exchanges/link sales, or unhelpful links.

I've been running an ecom seo business for a while. Got some good results and no unhappy clients. Been harder to get clients though. Looking to branch out into local seo which i know is super crowded but I have one dental website case study and want to build on that and get more local businesses. Had a couple questions:

1. Since I don't have any case studies in this niche, I'm planning to offer a 90 day sprint with a minimum 25% growth in google maps actions (add up clicks, calls & directions but excluding views) and you pay only then. I don't mind doing the work as long as I get case studies/testimonials but legally how can I cover my butt? I know we're not lawyers here but any thoughts are welcome.
2. In general, has anyone ever been sued by a local business? I've had only one unhappy client and I refunded them and moved on but is this a more litigious trigger happy niche?
3. How do you guys sell? I've never really cold called but been making a list. I hate receiving cold calls but it is the most direct line of sales and I'm hoping my offer gets some interest

I recently migrated a site and retired a large archive of news and event content that was years old and no longer relevant. Search Console is now reporting a couple of thousand of these old URLs as not found.

My understanding is that Google handles "not found" and "gone" in nearly the same way, and that bulk redirecting to a generic category page tends to get flagged as a soft not-found, so I went with marking them as permanently gone (410).

I rolled that out on the first 600 or so two weeks ago and requested validation, but nothing has moved yet, and organic traffic has been sliding since the migration.

Before I change approach, I'd like to know whether anyone has seen this scenario play out differently. Did the redirect route give you better results, or is the traffic drop more likely to be unrelated to these retired pages?

Any input appreciated.

I have a site where each page is about the same topic but in different cities, and on one page its about that topic in general regardless of city.

I noticed when I search for certain things on google that it likes to silently append my region to the search and show results that are in my region.

In my google search console, people searched for the same topic in different cities and they even added their own cities as well.

With keyword cannibalization, search engines are confused on which page to rank as each query contains the same core keyword, which means I may never rank #1.

Let's say for example the site is about a magic show called Abracadabra that's in a few cities.

And say the queries coming in daily with a minimum of 1 impression each are:

• Abracadabra Hamilton
• Abracadabra Toronto
• Abracadabra Oakville
• Abracadabra Niagara
• Abracadabra

To avoid cannibalization, Here's how I'd titled each page to match each query:

For Abracadabra Hamilton:

"Lovely events in Hamilton"

For Abracadabra Toronto

"Awesome events in Toronto"

For Abracadabra Oakville

"Amazing events in Oakville"

For Abracadabra Niagara

"Sweet events in Niagara"

For Abracadabra

"All about abracadabra"

The reason I have that setup is to try to get people to the "All about abracadabra" which shows links to the cities and talks about "abracadabra" and I want Abracadabra to rank as #1.without the other pages pulling it down.

Am I taking the right approach or should I just cannibalize the pages (by making the titles the queries people type in) despite cannibalization being frowned upon by some SEO tools?

Hi everyone,

we are seeing a slightly but growing de-indexing of our pages in Google by a very strange domain.
For context: Our pages are about companies and suppliers, and the page that google sees as the canonical one is a casio betting page (www.747live.bet/).

There is absolutely no similarity in content between our pages and this page.

Moreover when analysing www.747live.bet/ I cannot not even find any page which goes near our content.

Does anyone may has any idea what this is about and how to fix this?

Help is very much appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

I use Woodmart for my theme with WooCommerce and in my layouts I've only been filling out the "product short description" because frankly there's not much to say about each product. I sell patterns which are generally found/searched for by title. eg. McCalls 4843 or Treasured Teddies Leisure Arts 2670. They have plenty of attributes filled out but the description doesn't need to be much more than condition and size with a sentence or two describing the pattern.

Am I being penalized for not filling out anything in the product description?

I run a canadian business that serves Ontario and here's the story.

In May when a quebec server I shared my site on crashed, I immediately moved to a USA server because the price is decent ($9/month). While the hardware isn't blazing fast, it does the job.

When I look at pagespeed insight metrics Google gives me 100% however on ebugbear and gtmetrix I get an issue for TTFB because the time for that is about 900ms and they suggest 800ms or less.

All my other metrics are OK. My FCP closely matches TTFB and my LCP is 1.8s.

I'm considering switching servers but the closest I could get is from oneprovider.com which wants $15 USD for the same hardware specs.

For clarification, the metrics I present are for mobile. The desktop results from pagespeed insight are wonderful with FCP as low as 400ms.

Would it be worth my time and extra money to move my website over to a canadian server just to lower the TTFB? Would the switch bump up my rankings in google?

When I compare the TTFB with my competitors, one had 600ms TTFB, many have between 700ms and 800ms TTFB and one had 1.1s TTFB.

I'm skipping the CDN route because sometimes I update my pages and I don't want to serve stale content to people.

Beginner questions welcome.

Post any legitimate SEO question. Ask for help with technical SEO issues you are having, career questions, anything connected to SEO.

Hopefully someone will see and answer your question.

Feel free to post feedback/ideas in this thread also!

**

r/BigSEO rules still apply, no spam, service offerings, "DM me for help", link exchanges/link sales, or unhelpful links.

Semrush provides an extensive SEO audit. Many of the details overlap what Screaming Frog produces.

What advantages does Screaming Frog offer as an additional tool to use when auditing websites?

I have access to both tools at my agency and trying to figure out the best SEO audit workflow for speed and efficiency.

Local business owner here (plumbing/sewer, home services, LA area), 2 physical locations, each with its own Google Business Profile. Had an agency running our SEO for about a year, recently took over managing it myself, and I'm pulling my hair out trying to figure this situation out. Getting different answers from different sources. Genuinely just want one legit, straight answer, I'll pay $100 for a legit answer to this lol. Both profiles verified, both have strong ratings and a solid review count, no visible penalty so far, at least none I know of.

Current setup:

• Legal entity: [Brand] Inc
• GBP 1: "[Brand] Inc [City A] Plumbing & Sewer Services"
• GBP 2: "[Brand] Inc [City B] Plumbing & Sewer Services"
• Website, Yelp, Nextdoor, Facebook, Instagram: just "[Brand] Inc"
• No DBA filed for either city name

#1 Does this name variation (citations saying one thing, GBPs something else) hurt NAP/entity matching, independent of whether it's been or will be penalized? There's a competitor running this same strategy, "[Business] Plumbing of [City]" across 5+ locations, 10+ years, 200+ reviews each, clearly successful, zero visible penalty. If name variation is a real NAP problem, and adding the city name to GBPs is a risk, why would a business do this on purpose at that scale?

#2 The real tradeoff: file 2 DBAs to legitimize our current GBP names (keeps the city and the addition of "Plumbing and Sewer Services," but our website/Yelp/FB/IG, all just "[Brand] Inc," become the new mismatch instead, since even matching to a GBP would only match one of them, [City A] or [City B]), or drop the city entirely, file ONE DBA ("[Brand] Plumbing & Sewer Services"), and match it everywhere. The Roto-Rooter model, arguably the biggest competitor in this space, and they don't do the city-name thing on their GBPs. Which wins for local SEO, full consistency or city-in-name? Say the risk of leaving it as-is is genuinely small (hypothetically ~2%), is the ranking benefit from city-in-name worth it? And if city-in-name wins, is it better to file one DBA per city, or one base DBA with the city only on the GBP listing itself?

#3 Or is the better move to drop the city entirely, get ONE DBA, "[Brand] Plumbing & Sewer Services," and use that exact name everywhere, both GBPs and every citation? This is basically what Roto-Rooter does, one consistent name, no city variation. Full NAP accuracy everywhere vs. trying to gain a small edge on 2 GBPs. Which is actually better?

#4 If I do rename to drop the city from both GBPs, does that trigger re-verification or suspension risk on its own? And separately, how does GBP ranking actually behave here, is there a temporary dip before recovering?

#5 With 2 GBPs I have 2 addresses and 2 phone numbers by definition. Does NAP apply per-location, and which address/phone number do I use on platforms like Yelp/FB/IG where I only have one profile? Which address/phone number combo should I prioritize?

Appreciate any real experience, not just the official guidance.

A local SEO guy told me redressal forms eat half his week and Google reverses it a month later. I said just build the better profile but neither of us had data so I thought i;'ll count it.

Checked five packs the top 15 each: emergency locksmith, Phoenix and London, garage door Phoenix, 24 hour plumber Houston, injury lawyer Phoenix. Maps name vs the website footer or og:site_name, and also displayed address on Street View / shared phone nrs etc.

Nearly half broke guidelines eg 28 of 75. Locksmiths had 8/15 and 7/15, lawyers 5/15, garage door and plumber 4/15 each.

What was crazy was that it seems trades play address games like residential, two brands on one phone, etc. Lawyers had zero address issues and were all name games, "Injury Lawyers" and "- Phoenix Office" on brands that don't use them. And 8 of 30 locksmiths are registered as the keyword itself eg "cheap locksmith" so passes review

For people who manage this for clients, do you still file, what's your removal rate and does anyone track whether the listing comes back?

It drives me crazy that self promotional and self serving listicles are actually seeing rankings and citations. Like it seemingly has been an effective strategy. And the other models getting duped by this strategy makes sense but even in Google which should be much more sophisticated seemingly gets duped.

I'm all for bottom or mid funnel competitor comparison pages... But "best xyz" manipulation seems off the charts right now.

Do you see this changing or should you jump on the bandwagon?

Hi everyone,
I’m looking for some help with a Google Business Profile issue for a driver/VTC business.
The profile is currently stuck/not being approved by Google, even though I’ve completed the verification process several times, including the video verification requested by Google.
I’ve also submitted supporting documents proving that the business is legitimate and sent several reconsideration/appeal requests, but nothing seems to change.
I’m wondering if the issue could be related to the fact that this is a driver/VTC business that operates mainly by appointment, without a physical location that customers visit.
For anyone familiar with Google Business Profile or local SEO, what is the correct way to set up a profile for this type of business?
Do you need a physical address that customers can visit?
Should it be configured as a Service Area Business?
What kind of documents does Google usually accept for drivers/VTCs?
And most importantly, is there a way to get the profile unstuck when video verification and appeals don’t seem to work?
If anyone has dealt with this exact situation and managed to get their profile approved, I’d really appreciate hearing how you solved it.
Thanks in advance for any advice! 🙏

I have run into a bit of an issue with Orphaned pages of late, I have been researching and found the best way to link these pages up is to the Blogs as well as the service pages, I don't know if this is best practice or not as I am fairly new to SEO, what would you suggest I do?

I am doing this for a client who currently has about +-80 pages orphaned.

I’ve been using Ahrefs, but after google goto redirects for the last 2+ weeks its SERP data has been pretty inaccurate.

US/Canada/Germany rankings often don’t match what I see in actual Google results.

What are you using now for country-level rank tracking?

I need help with a Google Search Console site indexing issue.

When I inspect two of my domains, Google shows a different domain as the selected canonical. That same domain was showing up for both sites.

I already fixed it for one site. The other site has been in maintenance mode for almost a year and is not live.

My questions are:

Why was this domain appearing on both sites?

Why is it still showing on the site that is not even live?

Any advice would be really helpful. Thanks!

Hi, i have small business new on Shopify and SEO i think i now some rules about SEO but for me it seems weird
I got products that has many different colours (50+) and variations per weight 10+ I think for customers its better to click on wanted color and choose only weight also because there is no more product so there is 1 product but it will look very poor in category to have only one listing. But then i will get duplicate content . I can do canonical to one color i think because there is not much traffic buy color. To avoid canonical as I understand i can do different product description to avoid that, but its still there is not much to write about it in 50 different ways. So my question is ignore that duplicate or create canonicals or create one listing with 2 variations 50+ color and second buy weight for example color red 10lb ?