More and more of the results I check have Reddit threads and forum posts in the top spots. For a small site, those feel like the easiest keywords to win, because the competition isn't polished articles.

Right now I find them by hand: search a keyword, see what's ranking, note when forums dominate. It's slow.

Ideas I've had: checking the top results for a long list of keywords at once and flagging the ones led by forums, or starting from questions people ask on Reddit and checking whether a proper article ranks for them.

How do you find these at scale? And have you had luck ranking against Reddit threads?

Checking SEMrush and Botify, I have nearly all keyword rankings taking a massive drop. We've dropped from 30% visibility on average to 12% visibility.

Not sure if there's a confirmed algorithm update or not...

Hey guys

I just launched a site on 5 Oct. It was a tool site and it has about 500+ pages on launch. Everything went smoothly till 21 Oct. Earlier we were getting about 5 to 10 clicks. And on 22 Oct I audited my site and changed a lot of things on the 21st. I changed the title and description of 300 pages on 21 Oct. So on 23 Oct I found something fishy my clicks and impression went to less than 20 which was around 1000. And what I see is that mostly all of my pages go to crawled currently not indexes. It comes suddenly I don't know what caused this.

Is there any way by which I can recover all of the pages ? This happens only in google my bing is working normally.

For a while now my site has been picking up new spammy backlinks pretty much daily. Random scraper domains, weird TLDs, auto-generated pages, the usual junk.

Semrush picks up all of them. Google Search Console shows none of them, and the links report there looks normal.

A few questions for people who've dealt with this:
Is this targeted negative SEO, or just the background noise every site gets?
If GSC doesn't list them, is it safe to assume Google is ignoring them anyway?
Disavow or leave it alone? I know Google says it handles this automatically, but what do you actually do in practice?
Has anyone seen this kind of spam actually hurt rankings? Its mostly spam, casino links, wtf? Do u think these are coming from an competitor?
Mostly just annoying to watch it happen every day. Curious how others handle it.

I saw that u/thetafferboy posted this on LinkedIn - showing that Google do watch SEOs and used this to show that LLMs.txt is bunk!

Lets keep fighting those SEO Myths

Thanks to the best roving SEO story supremo - u/rustybrick

Google also added a new section for "Only index content meant for Search."

It says:

If your service lets users create shareable pages, generated outputs, or interactive tools, consider whether that content is meant to be found through search engines or only accessed directly by people with a link.

When pages are created for direct sharing, collaboration, or utility rather than public search discovery, apply the noindex rule (using a robots meta tag or X-Robots-Tag HTTP response header) or block crawling in robots.txt by default.

Google also added:

Verify your site or subdomain in Search Console so you receive email alerts if Google issues a manual action against your site or detects security issues. Also check the Page Indexing report and Search performance report regularly for unexpected spikes in indexed pages, impressions, or queries that don't match your platform's purpose.

Track platform-level creation and indexing metrics, and set up alerts for anomalies such as spikes in newly published public pages or a small number of users generating a large share of indexable URLs.

Haven't seen one like this in a while. I think it might be some good old referral spam like what Vitaly would do back in the day. Curious who else is seeing it.

Relatively new to SEO here, so be kind...

I'm a senior software engineer with a ton of practical web experience (having built sites with search engine friendly / accessible HTML) and what I believe is a good understanding of what "bad" scaled/templated content is and what "good" programmatic content is. Yet, GoogleBot has completely shunned my site.

I'm not here to plug my site - I'm here to understand what it is causing this shape in my Google Search Console (6 mo. ago to now):
______,,/\,,_______

I've seen a bunch of terrible directory sites that are getting organic traffic. There's obviously something they're doing that convinces Google they're legit that I'm not doing. I've been waiting for a few months after making a bunch of changes to get Google to like me again...

• ~17k rotating pages (events drop off) - the old pages have `noindex`.
• I'm offering unique insights that aren't available anywhere else on the web.
• Navigation, design, content quality and depth is all there.
• I am rendering affiliate links as the main CTA for most pages.

The funny thing is my site was never intended to be just a directory; it's actually a compliment to my mobile app and it has a directory component.

Anyway I look forward to yalls suggestions thanks for reading.

Hey all,

We have a lot of local foundation repair clients, and their primary GBP categories vary wildly when we’ve onboarded.

There is no “foundation repair” category on Google Business Profiles, and I have clients with “concrete contractor”, “waterproofing service” , and even just “foundation” as their primaries.

I flagged one the other day because their primary category is “foundation”. I’m under the impression that category is for like an actual non-profit foundation, not foundation repair. There is one other popular company in their area using “foundation” as a primary, the rest are the other two.

Am I right in thinking this is not a valid category for them? I feel like people are just seeing the word foundation and clicking. Idk if I’m going crazy or not lol. Would love to hear from anyone else doing local for contractors. Thanks!

I want to change my site's domain because I feel the current name no longer fits what the site has become. Almost none of my traffic comes from people searching for the brand name; it's almost entirely organic search traffic for the topic itself.

If I 301-redirect every URL on the old domain to its exact equivalent on the new one, will my rankings take a significant hit? Or, if I use the Change of Address tool in GSC and handle the migration cleanly, should the impact be minimal?

What is your experience on domain change for a website that depends on search traffic?

Hi everyone! I’m revamping my company’s website, including its structure and content, with SEO in mind where possible. I’d appreciate some advice on the homepage.

We sell a very niche product. The keyword that best describes it has low search volume, and the search intent seems mostly informational and unrelated to our product category.

Our homepage H1 currently uses a broader, higher-volume term instead. However, most of our homepage traffic comes from branded searches rather than searches for that broader term.

My questions are:

1. Why might the broader term not be driving traffic? Could it be because we only use it in the H1, or is a mismatch between our page and the search intent a more likely explanation?
2. Should the homepage H1 include the term that most accurately describes our product, even if its search volume is low? We already use this term on other pages, where it gets high impressions but a low CTR. That makes me suspect people searching for it are looking for something else. Would it still make sense to use it on the homepage for clarity and relevance?
3. More generally, how do you approach the main homepage headline? How do you balance accurately describing the product, communicating its value, and targeting relevant keywords?

Thanks for any insights!!

I’m currently working on an SEO project in the online casino niche, and it has been quite challenging.

We’ve been working on different SEO strategies, and one positive sign is that clicks to the website are improving. However, we’re still struggling to generate FTDs (First-Time Deposits).

Since the platform operates globally, we’re also dealing with the challenge of different GEOs, user intent, competition, and conversion behaviour.

I’m trying to understand where the actual gap might be. Is it the quality of organic traffic, search intent, landing page experience, trust signals, or something further down the conversion funnel?

For those who have experience with SEO in competitive iGaming or affiliate niches:

• How do you diagnose a situation where clicks are increasing but FTDs remain low?
• How do you identify which GEOs and keywords bring higher-intent users?
• What role do landing page optimisation, user experience, and conversion tracking play in improving FTDs?
• What would you prioritise first: traffic quality, content strategy, or conversion rate optimisation?

I’d love to hear practical insights, real-world experiences, and strategies that have worked for you.

Looking forward to learning from the community!

Genuinely asking because I just spent 2 months fixing every technical thing I could find on my own site (pre-rendering, canonical/redirect loops, hreflang, internal linking, sitemap) and indexed pages stayed stuck at exactly 2 the whole time.

Turned out Googlebot was rendering the pages fine — a chunk of them just had never been crawled at all, weeks after being in the sitemap. The domain had migrated earlier this year and has almost no backlinks outside a few self-referential ones.

So now I’m wondering if that’s the actual bottleneck — Google not prioritizing crawl on a low-authority domain — rather than anything technical. Anyone else run into this on a migration? Did building real backlinks end up mattering more than expected?

What the report covers

Citation sources are explicitly Microsoft Copilots and Partners. That means:

• Microsoft Copilot (including copilot.microsoft.com, Bing-integrated experiences, Edge, Windows, etc.)
• AI-generated summaries in Bing
• Select (unnamed) partner AI integrations

Your Grounding Queries

Queries where your site is already being cited, with exact counts. The top one (“geo search tracking ai search monitoring provider…”) alone accounts for 754 citations — a clear strength. Other solid performers include “bing search console,” “top experts in generative engine optimization,” etc.

Opportunity Query

Queries in the same topic where other sites are cited and yours is not (shown as ranges). These are the gaps: things like “seo services llm integration visibility” (5K–10K), “u.s. companies geo ai visibility optimization,” AI search visibility tools, etc. These are the clearest content/opportunity signals the report provides.

As a young web agency, we are trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t in 2026 to rank high in search and AI chats.

Following Googles new guidelines, it would seem that any “low-effort” content like LLM slip should punish ranking. However, that does not seem to be the case at the moment. When I Google questions like “how much does a website cost in my area” I get referred to articles that are clearly LLM made. So, is it AI slop really a good perceive to increase ranking ?

I would greatly appreciate some insight if some of you SEO aficionados know what is going on right now !

Some person who knows nothing about SEO sent me this - voluntarily.

The fight against purposeful disinformation isn't over yet!

Hi all! I’m not an SEO expert, more a general web dev/designer but my company is severely lacking in SEO so I took up the mantle in order to secure a promotion/raise lol the previous “seo strategist” said that we should strongly encourage practices (veterinary practices) with multiple locations to have separate sites. I know that’s wrong but I guess I just want validation that that’s not correct before bringing this up to managers. The previous person had the title “SEO Strategist” and I’m technically just “Senior Website Support Specialist” so I guess I want some backup before officially bringing this up 😅.

The correct strategy is to have one main site with location specific landing pages but have Business Profiles for each location? If there’s say a general vet that also does boarding or grooming, those can be separated because their technically different businesses but if it’s just a vet office with a couple locations around town, they don’t need separate sites. Correct?

What tools do you use to track AI search visibility?

I tried several (ranketa, seranking, peec.ai) but they all show different results.

I do not need a tool that has good numbers to make shareholders happy. I need a tool with acurate data

Soy de Venezuela y estoy cansado de trabajos esclavizantes que pagan 240-300$ mensuales, se siente frustrante trabajar y trabajar y no tener dinero para la cesta básica alimenticia y mucho menos para otras cosas.

Tengo 28 años, hace aproximadamente 8 años estuve leyendo sobre SEO y noté que era una época de auge ya que todo el mundo estaba trabajando en conseguir "nichos rentables" y eso. Ahora veo que con la llegada de la IA todo ha cambiado.

Quisiera aprovechar que conseguí este foro en Reddit y seguro que hay muchos expertos aquí, en una escala de dificultad del 1 al 5 qué tan difícil creen que sea conseguir unos ingresos de 300$~ mensuales con una web ?

Para otros países fuera de LATAM puede que 300$ no sea mucho dinero Pero aquí es el primer paso a la libertad 🗽

Hi all long time reader first time talker. So I've got an issue with my site, to cut a long story short this site was formally built on squarespace (I know I know I was new don't judge). The beginning of this year I moved the site to Wordpress, first by building a staging site using breakdance as the builder and eventually porting the domain. For a first time site I don't think I've done bad but there's no doubt in my mind that you guys will probably notice issues.

My business is in a pretty niche industry and in a rural setting so the competition is mostly old unoptimised sites, which has me wondering why am I barely ranking on google. I've hired an SEO company who are charging me £360 a month for 3 article style paid backlinks each month plus some polish on the site here and there. But I'm not really noticing any change in ranking.

I do have a GBP with reviews, posts, photos, etc but again that's not ranking in the maps pack at all, google just seems to be Sus of me in general, so I'm left wondering what should I do? can anyone here help.

the site is: https://northwoodlandscape.com

for context this is a site based in England, I own the .co.uk domain as well but wasn't sure if activating that would help.

Hello, I have a Hindi news and current affairs website. I've been using AI to write blogs for the past month and a half. Can someone explain to me whether Google ranks AI content? If not, I can try another method.

Hi, as the title suggests I am pretty new to the game. I have a personal dev blog running on my domain and 3 tools running on subdomains.

I started out beginning this month and impressions peaked at around 500 a day after 10 days. Over the course of 4 days my impressions decreased to 0(!) now.

Is this normal in the beginning?

Currently working on getting some high-quality backlinks

Is it normal for the Google Search Console to be behind? It's only showing data from October 18th and says only 61 pages have been indexed and 91 haven't been indexed. I counted the results from Google today and there are over 100 pages indexed so far. I used the site: function to check the indexing.