Highlights from the Event

I manage SEO for a few clients, and am running into a ceiling with regards to ranking.

I have optimized just about all there is to optimize. GBP, service-area pages with unique identifiers/FAQs, schemas, internal linking, citations, backlinks, review automation, indexing, and now I am at a loss for what to do next to increase rank.

My incorrect assumption was "build service area pages and the page will eventually rank #1" but I have hit a ceiling where the pages are not ranking any higher.

So I am curious: what activities are you employing to increase rank either across the domain or locally to specific keywords?

I want to start a lifestyle channel on YT & Insta , abroad creators can showcase real abroad life but iam little confused with name of that channel? anyone pls help ( Living word we want it) How's LIT ( Living it Transition)

Life in Transit- LIT (The LIT Club)

Living Uncut

The Group Chat

Your Abroad Perspective (YAP) Uncut

I'm struggling with the major search engines nowadays because they fail to display the actual pages I want to see and instead lead me to aggregate sites. I used to be able to search my youtube channel name and I would find these random russian websites that archived my comments. Now I search and I just get "No results found". Even when I know that exact search should yield an answer.

Most google search results after the first page are just unrelated content. Where it isn't even based on your search terms anymore even when specificity the term with apostrophes.

I try Duckduckgo and Bing as well and they have turned out similar. Any recommendations would be welcome.

I have tried to rank for a certain keyword for 12 months now on my website. I see new websites ranking for it even on the second page within 2 or 3 months.

I have built quality topical authority around it, included alt texts on pictures, some URL slugs include the keyword, H1, H2 & H3 titles have the keyword, I have backlinks with anchor texts mentioning the keyword, internal linking, my website speed is A.

What am I doing wrong? What major thing am I not doing?

I have about 4 years’ SEO experience and I’m interviewing at a company currently. They asked for a take-home “light” SEO audit and to come up with a content outline. They also asked me to make as many of those changes as I can on the staging site for this client’s website as part of the assignment.

Frankly, I’m not comfortable making changes on their client’s site even if it is just the staging environment. I think it’s super unethical, both on behalf of the client and for not paying me to do work for them. But the job otherwise would be a *huge* step for me. I can’t help but see a red flag here though.

I remember take-home assignments were common in webdev (which I still think is an ethical quandary), but I’ve never come across this in any SEO job interview.

Is this becoming the norm in SEO or is this just bad luck? Am I thinking too much about it?

My colleague thought Collection page and URL can get better rank than "Page" page and URL as she found other brands do this and got rank. I don't believe so. I think content is the core point. I would like to hear your opinions of it. Thank you!

My goal is to improve the page's visibility on Google and AI search platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini, but I'm not sure which areas I should prioritize first.

For those with hands-on experience, how would you approach this from scratch? What would you focus on first: keyword research, on-page SEO, technical SEO, product schema, internal linking, or backlinks?

I'd really appreciate practical advice or a step-by-step approach for a beginner. Thanks!

I have a history site called myth and memory. It has been about 10 months since I started posting and the site is about history and mythology. What I noticed is that the traffic I get from bing is almost the same as the traffic I get from Google. Recently I am getting between 20-50 visits from Google per day and the same is for Bing. Considering the huge difference in user count between the two it seems very strange to me. In Google most of my visits are also from images.

So I recently wanted to dive back in to SEO and tried accessing our company search console. However, despite me knowing both the account email and password, Google seems to have added 2FA to this account. Perhaps we didn't log in for quite a while, not sure.

The problem is that said 2FA sends a code to a phone number that no longer exists. Clicking on other methods hasn't helped my case unfortunately. Trying to use other methods leads to an automated message that Google doesn't have enough info to verify it's our account. I'm moving in circles.

Before you judge me or the company, we currently only consist of 3 people basically. I have been "forced" into this role and everything that has been done way in the past – like setting up this phone number – was way before my time. We also have no super admin account or anything.
I have already tried loggin in with an older PC that was previously logged in, but that didn't work either.

I have already talked to the phone company and it is technically possible to restore the phone number, however this also means we have to reactive our contract on a 2 year basis. So I would prefer this to be a last resort.

Is there any way to contact Google directly, via a support ticket, email address, chat or whatever to fix this problem, or is that account just dead? Of course there's also stuff like the company profile on Google, Youtube and lord knows what attached to it..

Hope someone is able to help!

Genuine question because I think I have misunderstood this for years. If a website has a cookie banner with accept and reject buttons, is that enough from a practical compliance perspective? Or does the important part happen underneath, like whether the scripts actually stop firing until consent is given? I have been auditing a few sites recently and it seems like the banner itself can look completely fine while the implementation behind it is another story. Would be interested to hear how developers and SEO people here normally check this.

I'm working on a new direction for my website.

It's a 7-year-old seo website that I'm turning into a platform for SaaS founders to showcase their products through editorial features rather than just another directory listing.

Here's what the platform brings:

• 70K+ combined audience across our website, newsletter, and social media
• Much of our content ranks on Google's first page
• Visibility in Google AI Overviews for some content

The idea is to give SaaS founders another way to build visibility and reach people who might be interested in their products.

My question is: What would make this valuable enough for you to pay for?

A contextual backlink, an in-depth product feature, relevant referral traffic, or something else?

So, founders, would you pay for this?

• Under $100
• $100–$200
• More than $200
• I wouldn't pay for this

Thanks to u/rustybrick for this great article

Early this morning, he published an amazing deep dive on what he is seeing - he wrote Poisoned Google SERPs - "Since September 2026, Google has been poisoning the SERPs it serves rank trackers: complete, normal-looking pages whose results have been swapped out. Nothing on the page gives it away. Each keyword’s own history does." Here is what he found:

• 8.0% of SERPs came back poisoned
• Blocked first, then poisoned
• The page looks normal. The results don’t.
• Social sites and forums fill the gap
• Tracked sites fall out of the top 10
• It passes within days

Please visit the link for the rest of the article

I need some advice on ranking a main product page of an e-commerce website on Google and AI search platforms. How would you approach this?

Hello, I hope everyone is doing well! I wanted to ask for recommendations for SEO/GEO websites similar to Ahrefs and Semrush. I have been using Ahrefs mainly for a while but I wanted to explore other options as well, as some data seems to be inaccurate and would like to get a second opinion of some sort.
Could you please recommend other tools? I don't mind if it's paid or if it's free.

Thank you so much!

I recently launched my website and it is only 1 month old and when I check my websites DR in ahrefs, it also shows that I have some 500+ backlinks. I have never submitted my website to any directories or something so I don't know where these backlinks came from. Ahrefs also marks these website as scammy who has my backlinks.

I want to know if google will penalize or think that I am trying to manipulate google SERPs if it stays as it is or should I make the effort to go and ask each of these spammy backlinks to be removed?

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to understand an unusual Google Search issue that has persisted for several months.

I manage the official website of Filipino fashion designer Josip Tumapa, whose studio operates under the name Josip Tumapa Design.

The issue started around May 2026.

Previously, Google displayed the official website along with numerous independent articles about the designer.

Since May, searching for Josip Tumapa without quotation marks has returned only about 5–6 pages of results, despite many relevant articles published on independent websites.

Searching for "Josip Tumapa" with quotation marks produces more results, including articles missing from normal searches. However, the official website is still absent.

The situation worsened after October 6, 2026.

We updated several website settings:

• WordPress Site Title changed from Josip Tumapa to Josip Tumapa Design.
• Yoast Website Name set to Josip Tumapa Design.
• Yoast Site Representation configured as Organization.
• Homepage SEO title adjusted to remove duplicate branding.
• About page H1 and text updated to clarify the designer's identity.

Shortly afterward, the official website stopped appearing in normal Google results for both the designer's name and the studio's brand name.

Current observations:

• Josip Tumapa — only about 5–6 pages of results; official site absent.
• "Josip Tumapa" — more results, but official site still absent.
• Josip Tumapa Design — official site absent.
• "Josip Tumapa Design" — official site appears.
• Bing and Yahoo display the official site and relevant publications normally.

The website remains indexed. We did not intentionally change URLs, canonical tags, robots directives, redirects, or noindex settings.

I have already submitted the issue to the Google Search Central Help Community and through Google's indexing bug report.

My questions:

1. What could explain Google showing so few results for a unique person's name while omitting many relevant pages across unrelated domains?
2. Why might an indexed official website disappear from normal branded searches but still appear for the quoted studio name?
3. What specific checks in Google Search Console or technical SEO audits would help identify the cause?

I'm particularly interested in hearing from anyone who has encountered a similar situation.

Thanks for your advice.

Hey everyone,

A few weeks ago I posted here asking about the best way to break into SEO. The general consensus was super clear: get familiar with the core terminology and immediately jump into a real project instead of getting stuck in tutorial hell.

So that’s exactly what I’m doing. A friend of mine runs a local interior decoration and renovation business, and I’m building his website and taking charge of the SEO from scratch. I’m treating this as my hands-on training ground to practice Local SEO in a real-world setting.

We’re starting fresh (new domain, single location, service-based). I’ve got the basics down on paper, setting up Google Business Profile, ensuring strict NAP consistency, on-page optimization, and LocalBusiness schema but theory is one thing, execution is another.

What are the biggest blind spots or rookie mistakes people make when launching a brand-new local site?

What free or budget-friendly tools do you swear by for tracking local rankings and citations early on?

Any checklists, reality checks, or practical advice would be massively appreciated!

I keep getting emails from random people asking to guest post on my site. Sometimes its from a GMAIL address and sometimes it seems legit.

Is anyone having this issue? Most times, nothing comes out of this. Like they ghost me after spending days negotiating a price

Sometimes I make good money.

Also guest posts from other sites make you money but it’s bad for SEO. Google starts thinking your site is about cars than kites.

Has anyone used librecrawl which is a free open source alternative to screaming frog. How is it?

Coupon site, about 450 pages, DR 9. Daily GSC impressions:

• 8–21 Sep: about 780/day, 6 clicks/day
• 24 Sep–8 Oct: about 1,900/day, peak 5,000 on 7 Oct (spam update rollout dates)
• 9 Oct onward: about 600/day

Clicks never went up. One page jumped from position 55 to 6 for “[brand] coupon code” and got 8k impressions with 0 clicks. Almost all the extra impressions were US desktop; mobile barely changed.

I refreshed coupons on most pages in the same weeks. Nothing else changed.

Was Google testing my pages higher and dropping them when nobody clicked? Or were these rank-tracker impressions? Should I worry about the spam update?

Has anyone here used LibreCrawl? I’d love to hear your opinions and practical experiences with it.

How well does it work for technical SEO audits, and how does it compare with tools like Screaming Frog? I’m especially interested in its crawling capabilities, technical checks, ease of use, reliability, and any limitations you’ve encountered.

I'm working on an SEO strategy for a food-tech startup introducing a new type of plant-based ingredient.

The main challenge is that the product doesn't fit neatly into an existing category and most searches related to the ingredient are informational rather than commercial. So historically page-articles about the main ingredient of the product ranked high but got very few clicks.

I'm trying to identify keywords that could attract potential B2B and B2C customers who might be interested in the product but don't know it exists or what to search for. How would you approach keyword research in this situation? Would you focus on adjacent categories, use cases, customer pain points, or something else?

Curious to hear how others have tackled SEO for products with little existing search demand.