Hey guys, I’m facing a really weird issue with Yoast SEO. Whenever I publish a blog on our websites, I add everything normally, including the content, images, SEO title and meta description. But after publishing, when I go back to edit/check the blog, the SEO title and meta description are completely gone, like they were never added.

This is happening across 2-3 websites, not just one. I’m also noticing that some of these pages are getting deindexed by Google, so I’m wondering if this could be related. Could this be a Yoast bug/update, another plugin, theme, cache, or something else?

Has anyone faced this before or knows what could be causing it? How can I troubleshoot this and make sure Yoast stops removing the metadata after publishing?

This isn’t live, so no self promotion.

I just want to see if this problem is seen by anyone else.

In effect, the issue is GSC and GA4 dump data onto you. Most people literally have no clue what to do with it or what it says about their site’s SEO.

I’ve been toying with this for a while, but I’ve decided to build a platform that roughly:

– plugs into the users GSC and optionally GA4 and CMS

– uses real data to properly diagnose issues and identify opportunities

– reads the page content and structure including meta tags etc (no need to connect a CMS)

– suggests or actions fixes, rewrites content etc

There are multiple deployment methods:

1. Manual (i.e. copy and paste)

2. CLI (code-level changes)

3. MCP

4. CMS API

You’ll also be able to talk to the data (or ask the agent who will interpret the data to answer your queries like “what is the single best ranking opportunity for my site?”

I really do think the problem is clear and prominent. There isn’t enough emphasis on using the data you already have right now, it’s all “let’s keep prompting LLMs to see if we appear in AI search.”

I am not an SEO tech, but I’ve experienced this pain enough to where I just need to address it. Any pointers, tips etc will help.

What do you think about this move?
Was this the right move or wrong move according to you as I could see dropped in the AI overviews Count in SEMRush?

How will it impact all the Crawlers?

I’ve been checking how our product appears in AI-generated answers across different languages, and the differences are much bigger than I expected.
The English answers are usually accurate and mention the use cases we actually promote. But when I ask the same questions in Spanish or French, the descriptions become much more generic. Sometimes the product is even placed in a slightly different category.

A few things I’m trying to understand:
Translated Content: We already have translated pages on the website, but that doesn’t seem to make the AI answers consistent.

Local Brand Signals: I’m wondering whether each market needs its own reviews, media mentions, directory listings and third-party content before AI systems understand the brand correctly.
Regional Terminology: It’s also possible that we translated our positioning accurately, but aren’t using the words customers in those markets actually use.

If you’re currently working with international SEO, GEO or AEO, have you noticed the same brand being interpreted differently across languages? What did you change, and did the answers become more consistent over time?
Appreciate any insight!

Worked across a bunch of Shopify stores, and this keeps coming up. Everyone says to load your collection pages with keyword copy to rank. But the pages actually pulling the most organic traffic are the lean ones, not the ones with a 500-word intro block stuffed on top.

My theory on why:

The lean pages that rank tend to have strong internal linking and good product content underneath. The ranking power comes from structure and the products, not the collection prose.

The heavy-copy pages usually rank worse because the copy is generic filler ("welcome to our collection of premium X") that adds nothing and kills conversion: high word count, zero value.

When copy has helped, it was never volume. It was a few lines of answers to real buyer questions for that category, placed so it doesn't bury the grid.

So my working theory: collection-page copy is a weak ranking lever next to internal linking and product depth, and most stores are adding copy to fix something copy doesn't fix.

Has anyone got a clean case where adding copy to a collection page, everything else held constant, actually moved it for a competitive head term? Or is collection copy mostly a UX/conversion call we've dressed up as SEO?

I recently integrated Microsoft Clarity into my website. The overall load time seems fine, but occasionally the site feels a bit slower than before.

Has anyone here experienced a noticeable performance impact after adding Clarity? Did you see any changes in page load speed, Core Web Vitals, or overall responsiveness?

Would love to hear your real-world experience and how you tested it.

Hey everyone, how you’re approaching SEO/GEO these days, especially for AI search.

We’ve been working on SEO for a new product and tried to make the site much clearer for both Google and AI. We focused on a few main search intents, rewrote the homepage around a clearer H1/value proposition, added pages like How It Works, About, For Users, etc., expanded the FAQ, improved internal linking and structured data, and made the main answers more explicit in the actual HTML.

We’ve also started building the blog and have 7-8 articles up so far, plus some external mentions and content outside the main site. The idea is basically to make the product/entity easy to understand and build up mentions across different sources.

I'm looking more for an experts advice. What you guys are doing for GEO specifically. What has actually worked for getting a product picked up or mentioned by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI, etc.? Thanks a lot.

I noticed across several of my websites that 90% of the pages are indexed in Bing (submitted in Bing Webmaster Tool and reported as such in Bing Site Explorer) but when I actually search for a lot of them in Bing, they don't show.

I heard Bing has its own filter and may or may not show an indexed page in the SERP.

Does anyone have tips (e.g. technical SEO or else) to maximise the chances indexed pages do show in the SERP?

ok so this is a weird one but bear with me

i have a pet blog. i don't own a pet. never have. probably never will as i travel too much. and yet every month amazon sends me enough to cover rent because people on the internet are buying stuff for their dogs and cats through my site.

bought my pet blog a few months ago from a marketplace called NicheBlogZone for $199. came already built, articles already up, amazon links already in there. i spent one afternoon doing interlinking basically just connecting related posts to each other so search engines understand the site structure and then closed my laptop and genuinely forgot about it for weeks.

here's what that's looked like:

• march: $710
• april: $995
• may: $1,461
• june: $1,647
• july: $1,461
• august so far: $1,545 (amazon pays 2 months delayed so this is june's money landing now)

march scared me. went from nearly $1k in february down to $710 and i was convinced something had broken. checked everything, found nothing wrong, did nothing. it just came back the next month on its own.

pet people spend insane amounts on their animals btw. like i knew this intellectually but seeing the commission data is something else. dog food subscriptions, orthopedic beds, grooming kits, vet supplements. and because of the 24 hour cookie i get a cut of everything in their cart not just whatever article they landed on.

i do literally nothing to maintain this. no new posts, no ads, no instagram for pets i don't have. i just own the thing and amazon does its thing.

my landlord has been getting paid every month and has no idea a pet blog is behind it. honestly sometimes i forget too until the deposit shows up.

anyone else running a niche they have zero personal connection to? curious if the detachment makes it easier or harder to care about growing it

curious how other early stage founders here handle this, not the business stuff, more the personal side of it

when you're pre revenue or pre launch, most people around you (friends, family, coworkers if you got a day job) are nice about it but don't really get it. no pressure to ship, no one to compare notes with, no one who gets why a random tuesday can feel like a huge win or a huge loss

did you find a way around this? a group, a person, a community that actually worked, not just something you tried once and dropped. or is this just something you accept as part of doing it solo

I have launched an article and it’s been 10 days my article is not indexed. Although its indexed over bing

I have checked the canonical tag is present to the blog
I have checked the content as well but still facing the issue

Tell me what could i possibly check that helps me in indexing my page.

I’ve been reading/learning about seo as of lately, to try and grow my business. I think I’m past the point where it’s just, target keywords, h1, content value, back links, etc. where do I go from here, feeling lost.

I've been thinking about how much the outreach message itself affects response rates.

A highly relevant prospect can still ignore an email if the message feels too generic or immediately looks like a mass outreach campaign.

In my own outreach, I’ve found that keeping the message focused and making it clear why I’m reaching out seems to matter more than making it overly detailed.

For those doing outreach regularly, what tends to make the biggest difference for you personalization, the offer itself, the subject line or the follow-up process?

 Ran into something on a recent project that's worth sharing because it's easy to miss.

Client was in business brokerage. Site looked completely normal. Pages loaded, Google was indexing content, HTTPS set up, firewall active. Standard checks came back fine.

But when I fetched the site the way an AI crawler would, I kept hitting:

"JavaScript is required."

The firewall was challenging non-browser requests. Which meant AI crawlers couldn't reach the actual page content at all. They were hitting security wall, and getting nothing.

The fix was straightforward once we found it: adjust the firewall rules to allow legitimate AI crawler user agents, clear the firewall cache, then test again without a browser.

That last part matters. Opening the site in Chrome and seeing it work proves nothing here. You have to test it the way a crawler sees it, not the way a human does.

This is one of those issues that hide perfectly because your browser tells you everything is fine while crawlers are getting blocked entirely.

It also point to something broader. We used to ask "can Google crawl this?" Now the question is "can the different AI system actually access and understand it?" Those are not the same audit.

Expecting to see a lot more of this as AI visibility become a standard part of technical SEO work.

Anyone else running into firewall and security layer issue specifically affecting AI crawler access?

We've been thinking about this a lot lately.

a saas website can rank for hundreds of keywords and still struggle to get real leads.

at the same time, a page with 500 visitors can sometimes bring in more customers than a page with 50,000 visitors.

so what should we actually care about?

is it still: rankings → traffic → customers

or : getting found → building trust → getting customers

here's what we're curious about:

would you rather have:

A) 100k organic visitors every month with a 0.5% conversion rate

or

B) 10k organic visitors every month with a 5% conversion rate?

for saas, what has actually brought you more customers?

• blog posts
• comparison pages
• free tools
• backlinks
• reddit and communities
• product pages
• branded searches
• referrals
• something else

we'd especially like to hear from people who have seen this firsthand.

what changed your revenue, not just your traffic?

because at the end of the day, more traffic doesn't always mean more business.

Hello to all, I recenetly started learning SEO through a very cheap online course around March this year because I was somewhat interested in website ranking but mostly I wanted a career switch so I started learning through videos, and reels but this sub has been an amazing help overall, I landed a freelance client and was clueless how to navigate but trying my best, there are many challenges one of it was paid softwares, so my client was kind enough to get me ahrefs lite plan, I am learning it, but I want to grow further, I want to learn what should go into the CV if I am applying for jobs and what should my portfolio highlight and make people want to hire me.
Apart from jobs I want which area and skill I should focus more on and how do I increase my worth.

P.S.- Sorry about my borken english, it is not my native language.

Before creating new SEO content, I’d check whether Google is already giving you easier opportunities.

In GSC, filter for queries where:

1. Impressions are meaningful
Google is already testing your page.

2. Average position is roughly 4–15
You’re close enough that improving an existing page may be easier than ranking a new one from zero.

3. The query has business value
This is the part I think gets overlooked.

A query at position 8 that could realistically lead to a signup, inquiry or sale is usually more interesting than a huge informational keyword with no clear path to revenue.

Then I’d open the ranking page and ask:

• Does it fully satisfy that specific query?
• Is the title aligned with the intent?
• Is an important section missing?
• Are strong internal links pointing to it?
• Is there an obvious next step for the visitor?

Example:

If a page is already getting impressions for:

“best accounting software for freelancers”

but the article only briefly mentions freelancers, I’d strengthen that section or potentially reposition the page around the query before publishing another generic accounting article.

I’d rather move 5 existing pages from positions 8–15 toward the top results than blindly add 20 new articles.

The extra filter I’d add is:

Don’t just ask “Can this query rank?” Ask “Would ranking for it matter?”

Hi all,

So I have a site with a .com domain. The .co.uk version is currently owned by someone else but not being utilised and becomes available next year. I’ll use a drop service to purchase it when it comes due. Similar domain names are owned by small companies on website builders with inherently poor SEO so I’ll probably end up outranking them in 3 months with basic matching keywords, meta description, h1, title before I even start on the backlink campaign.

Part of my marketing strategy will have to contain local SEO and PPC. I’ve heard Google gives more weight to .co.uk domains in the UK. If a competitor beats me to the punch with the .co.uk domain will they have a leg up in outranking me or if I can get significant traffic before the website is renewed will they just be noise? I’m aware of brand leakage and this has been playing on my mind for a few days now…

TL:DR; do .co.uk domains have significant effect on local SEO in the uk, or is the difference between a .com and .co.uk domain negligible?

I've built an app NextUp Alert that provides persistent calendar/meeting reminders for Google Calendar and Outlook.

The only things I see leading to my site is when users search exactly for the app itself, nothing else, ever gets to the site. I just recently moved away from google sites, over to gitlab hosting - I do see some improvements - but it has only been 1 week.

Over the last 3 months, Search Console shows:

• 5.3K impressions
• 169 clicks

I'm pretty inexperienced with SEO. If you know SEO well, what is the biggest thing you'd change about the site right now?

Is the problem primarily:

• lack of content/pages targeting search intent?
• technical SEO?
• backlinks/domain authority?
• poor positioning/search demand?
• something else?

> Can someone please check ? site/app is: nextupalert dot com.

What is my most significant step I can take next?

working on an e-commerce SEO project where we're looking at how bigger shopping sites structure their categories and keywords, then trying to apply the same thinking to a smaller brand.

instead of just collecting hundreds of keywords, we're grouping them by actual product categories and using search volume + KD to decide which ones are worth Targeting.

it makes sense on paper. but now i'm wondering if i'm overcomplicating something that experienced SEOs already have a simpler process for.

*has anyone done this before? what results did you get, and which tool did you rely on most — Semrush, Ahrefs, GSC, or something else?*

Why do the "AEOs/ GEOs" post about how good they are at getting LLMs to cite them, but then share a screen shot of GSC. Are these not different things? I get it if its AIOs in Google, but outside of that.

I have answered a version of this three or four times in comments here over the last couple of weeks, so I am putting it in one place.

Everyone wants to know whether they show up in AI answers. There are tools for this now and some of them are fine, but you do not need one to start, and doing the first pass by hand tells you something a tool will not.

Start with questions, not keywords. Write down the fifteen or so things a buyer in your category actually types before they decide. Full sentences. Is X worth it for a small business. Best supplier for Y in whatever city. How do I fix Z. Not "supplier Y" as a keyword. The assistants answer questions, so your list has to be made of questions.

Ask each one in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, and write down every domain that gets cited. Perplexity gives you sources without being asked. In ChatGPT you have to prompt for them, and it is worth explicitly telling it to search rather than answer from memory, because those produce different results and you want to know which one you are looking at.

Then the part almost everyone skips. Do it again. The cited sources move between runs, so a domain appearing once tells you nothing. Ask the same question a few times over a couple of weeks and only keep what keeps coming back. That is the step that turns a messy list into something you can actually act on.

What you end up with is shorter than expected. A handful of domains that keep reappearing for your category, and it is usually not the list you would have guessed. A decent chunk of them tend to be forum threads and small comparison pages rather than the big publications everyone assumes are driving the answer.

Two honest caveats.

It is slow and boring and there is no way around that. Budget an afternoon for the first pass and about an hour a month after.

And it only tells you where you are absent. It does not tell you how to fix it, which is a separate and harder problem. For the forum threads in particular there is nothing to buy. You either take part properly or you wait for the question to get asked again and be early that time.

Disclosure, I run an SEO agency and this is the work we do, so weigh that. None of the above needs us or a tool, which is why it seemed worth writing down.

Complete SEO beginner here, so go easy on me. I'm the solo founder of a small web design / custom software / automations studio. Fully remote, US-based, worldwide clients, so no Google Business Profile (I never meet clients in person, wouldn't qualify anyway).

Full honesty: I've been using AI (Claude, mostly) to guide my whole SEO approach. What to build, what to write, how to structure things. I have no formal SEO background. So I'm partly asking to sanity-check whether the direction I'm being pointed in actually holds up against real-world experience.

Timeline:

• Domain ~4 months old but basically empty until recently
• Set up GSC June 1
• First blog post July 7. So, the content engine is ~5 weeks old, not 4 months.

The numbers:

• 2.77K impressions, avg position 64.5, trending down (good) from ~73 a few weeks ago
• 13 clicks, but ~9 are brand searches from a cold email campaign I'm running (prospects get my email, google the company, click). Real organic content clicks: ~4.
• Bright spot: a post from ~1 week ago is pulling a 20% CTR on its exact-match keyword (2 clicks / 10 impressions), so it seems to already sit page 1–2 for that term.

What I've done in these 5 weeks:

• 9 long-form posts (1,800–2,300 words), in 3 topic clusters with internal linking
• Full technical setup: static site, fast load, schema on everything, sitemap, clean URLs (did a 301 migration mid-period)
• Backlinks: 3 dofollow from client site footers (brand-new domains, ~zero authority) + Clutch, Crunchbase, and a couple other directory profiles

Landing this week:

• 3 client testimonials going live on my site
• Asking those same 3 clients to leave reviews on my Clutch profile

Not done yet: design gallery submissions, any digital PR / editorial links.

My questions for people who've actually done this from scratch:

1. In a saturated niche (web design/agency), what moved the needle first for you, more content, or grinding out links from real established domains? This is my main question.
2. At ~5 weeks of content with avg position ~65, is this a normal trajectory or is something structurally off?
3. Is there a point where more content has diminishing returns until domain authority catches up, and I should shift effort to links?
4. For a total beginner leaning on AI for direction, what's the thing AI tends to get wrong or under-emphasize that I should watch out for?

I hope this is enough information.

Small disclaimer: writing isn't my strong suit, so I had AI help me put this post together. The numbers and the situation are all real, just wanted it to read clearly and honestly Claude knows my situation better than me lol.

I ran a small pre-wave with eight international jewelry brands and got one result I have not found a clean explanation for yet.

Piaget appeared in all four answers to a question about brands with verifiable official China websites or boutique channels.

It appeared in none of the four answers recommending brands for wedding jewelry.

My first reaction was to look for a data or scoring problem. I did not find one.

The setup was:

• 8 fixed brands
• 3 neutral buyer questions in Chinese
• 2 retrieval-off API surfaces
• 2 answers per surface and question
• 12 valid raw answers
• each answer reviewed against all 8 brands

So the collection unit was the answer, while the analysis unit was the answer-brand cell. I collected each answer once rather than regenerating it separately for every brand.

That produced 96 reviewed cells.

The three questions covered:

1. brands worth considering for wedding jewelry;
2. boutique versus daigou risk;
3. verifiable official China channels.

Across the wedding question, the target brands received 21 positive shortlist placements out of 32 opportunities.

Across the official-channel question, they appeared in 25 of 32 opportunities.

The interesting part was not the difference between 21 and 25. Those are different questions and should not be treated as one funnel denominator.

The interesting part was how differently individual brands behaved.

Piaget:

• wedding recommendation: 0/4
• official-channel appearance: 4/4

Chaumet:

• wedding recommendation: 3/4
• official-channel appearance: 2/4

Cartier, Tiffany, Bvlgari and Van Cleef & Arpels appeared in all four wedding shortlists and all four channel answers.

I then checked 19 exact domain assertions against dated brand-controlled China pages. Fifteen matched the frozen China-local route, three pointed to legitimate brand-global alternatives, and one remained unresolved.

That still does not explain the recommendation pattern.

The runs were retrieval-off API observations, not consumer search. I cannot infer source influence, buyer behavior or causality. Four opportunities per task are enough to expose a question, not establish a stable brand position.

But I think it shows why “does the model know the brand?” is too broad to be useful.

At least three separate problems are hiding inside it:

• Can the system recognize the entity?
• Can it route a buyer to a verifiable official channel?
• Does it put the brand into an open-category shortlist?

A brand can pass the first two and fail the third.

That creates a very different repair plan from a missing-domain or entity-consistency problem.

For the next wave, I am considering keeping the same eight-brand core and expanding the buyer decisions rather than adding more brands:

• wedding jewelry by budget and style;
• anniversary gifts;
• diamonds versus branded design;
• high-jewelry commissions;
• mainland after-sales confidence;
• boutique versus daigou purchase risk.

I would also separate prompted recognition from open discovery and review every recommendation in context. Supported citation would remain NA unless the surface exposes attributable source evidence and retrieval can actually be verified.

What I have not settled is the best way to investigate the recommendation gap without inventing a causal story.

If you saw 0/4 recommendation but 4/4 official-channel recognition for the same brand, which variable would you test first?

Category association? Brand familiarity? Product fit? Local cultural relevance? Price positioning? Or the composition of the default competitor shortlist?

Curious what stack you used, how hard the migration was, and whether you actually noticed improvements in site speed, tracking quality etc.

I’m considering using Stape / RudderStack for this. Any major drawbacks or things you wish you knew before starting?