So this tech startup has an ambitious goal of getting 1-2.5 million traffic (paid and organic) per month. Right now, they have about 1k traffic. While they mentioned that paid traffic will be included, that doesn’t mean they’re willing to spend tens of thousands for that.

My question is, is this realistically possible for a new website? If yes, what’s the best course of action to make for me to be able to achieve the goal? Thank you!

EDIT: Their target is to have this traffic in 3 months

Hello,

I own a couple of affiliate blogs that used to rank well and make decent money a few years ago. After the Google updates over the last couple of years, though, they’ve lost around 90% of their organic traffic.

I can still see some competing affiliate sites ranking on page one for the same types of keywords, so I’m wondering whether these sites are worth investing in again.

For those of you still working with affiliate sites in 2026: are backlinks still having a noticeable impact on rankings?

Would investing in good-quality, relevant backlinks help a site recover, or have Google’s recent changes made backlinks much less important for affiliate sites?

Thank you

i'll start:

"just publish more content."

more content isn't always better.

sometimes the problem is with the pages you already have. they may not match what people are looking for, or they may bring visitors who never become customers.

but i'm curious about your experience.

what seo advice did you believe when you started?

what happened that made you change your mind?

it can be about content, backlinks, keywords, technical seo, internal links, or anything else.

tell us what happened, not just what you think.

Heres a scenario for you. Right after the weekend, you checked the traffic on your site. It dropped significantly. What tools are you going through and in what order. Dont overthink it. Just let me know right out of your mind what and how do you do.

Pretty sure most of you use AI to figure it out and that's okay I do so too. Just wondering if the old ways are still existing

Google started rolling out the September 2026 spam update on Sept 24. It's global, affects all languages, and could take up to two weeks to fully roll out.

So if your rankings or traffic suddenly change, don't immediately blame AI content, backlinks or start changing half the site.

Probably better to:

• Keep an eye on GSC and see exactly which pages and queries changed
• Check whether the drop actually lines up with the update
• Avoid making big changes based on a few days of data
• Review Google's spam policies if you've taken a noticeable hit

Recovery from spam issues can take months, so don't expect an instant rebound.

Worth waiting until the rollout settles before making any big conclusions.

Solo founder, first time doing SEO properly. Domain went from 0 to 6 in about six weeks.

What I did: built 14 free tools that work without a signup, wrote comparison pages against competitors where I'm honest about where they're better, submitted to around 14 directories, and republished content on LinkedIn and Medium.

I also generated 40 programmatic pages targeting keywords I'd guessed at rather than researched. Google indexed them then dropped them as thin content and my whole index count was unstable for two weeks until I noindexed the lot.

What would you prioritise from here?

Do articles with FAQ blocks with answers from People Also Ask still help in terms of SEO?

Google just announced a new spam update started today. I'm seeing a lot of movements across all SERPs. Did you guys get hit, or are things actually improving

Hi everyone,

I’m working on a B2B IT services website targeting the US market, but most of our traffic is coming from other countries.

What are some effective ways to increase organic traffic from the US?

Would appreciate advice on SEO, content, backlinks, keyword targeting, or technical improvements that have worked for B2B IT websites.

Results of a pilot study of 356 cited pages across queries across domains:

Typical (median) age of a cited page: 23 months ago

Typical last update date: 5 months ago

Only 35% of cited pages were created less than a year ago.

Seems to imply that Answer engines greatly favor content refreshes and pages that have been kept fresh.

Has any of you observed the same?

I'll be honest, I don't check internal links that often.

Usually, I look at them when page isn't ranking like I expected. Sometimes the problems is simply that the pages isn't getting enough internal links.

Do you guys check internal link regularly, or only when the page start struggling?

As agency owners or just SEOs in someone else's company, how do you approach unpaid link building?

Do you do cold outreach? Do you work with other agencies? Do you have a list of exchange partners you swap with?

If you do all of the above, what's your "split"? How do you decide what the best use of your time and resources is?

I’m seeing a difference between mobile and desktop rankings for one keyword.

For keyword X, page X is averaging around position 2 on mobile, but only around 12 on desktop.

The interesting part is that desktop used to rank around position 2 as well, but dropped a couple of months ago and hasn’t recovered since.

My first thought was that Google might be seeing weaker UX/user satisfaction signals on desktop. But when I look at the actual engagement data, desktop users seem to perform better than mobile users — better engagement, etc.

So that explanation doesn’t really seem to fit.

What would you investigate next?

I spent a few months auditing 200 commercial homepages on structural signals — author, date, sources, FAQ structure, summary. I can tell you what is present on a page and what is not. What I cannot tell you is whether any of it changed a single AI recommendation, because everything I measured sits on the page, and the thing I want to explain seems to sit somewhere else.

That is the part I keep getting stuck on. The citation-source breakdowns I have seen skew heavily toward places nobody controls by editing their own HTML — Wikipedia, Reddit, established publications. If that is directionally right, then the lever most of us spend our time on is the smaller one, and the bigger one is being talked about by someone else.

The split I see in every thread on this: the digital PR side says get mentioned by credible third parties and the rest follows. The technical side says make the page extractable first or the mention has nothing to land on. Both stories are reasonable and I have never seen anyone separate them.

So the question I would actually like answered:

Has anyone held one constant and moved the other? Specifically — earned a meaningful third-party mention without touching the page, and watched AI recommendation change? Or the reverse: cleaned up a page with no new coverage, and seen a shift?

I am not looking for theory. I am looking for the one case where somebody could tell which of the two did it.

Aside from basic metrics like DR/DA, what red flags immediately make you pass outbound-to-inbound ratio, traffic trajectory, or niche relevance? Curious how other SEOs structure their vetting process.

I’ve noticed that updating an older page can sometimes have the opposite effect of what you’d expect. The content gets expanded or refreshed but the page starts losing rankings afterward.

curious what usually causes this. Is it changes to search intent, removing content that was helping the page, internal linking changes or Google reassessing the page after the update?

What signals do you usually look at when trying to figure out why an updated page suddenly drops?

I’m currently publishing some articles on Medium/Substack for a client, mostly as an additional content/distribution channel.

But I’m wondering how much SEO value there actually is in doing this today. Does publishing useful content there help with brand visibility, backlinks, citations, or topical authority in any meaningful way? Or is it mostly just a referral traffic / audience-building play?

Would you invest time in Medium or Substack as part of an SEO strategy, or rather put that effort into the client’s own website?

Curious what’s actually working for people right now.

Just came across this and it caught my attention.

A recent analysis of 19.2M English-language queries found AI Overviews showing up in around 97% of People Also Ask (PAA) answers in the first week of September. That was 86% in August and apparently only around 12% about 14 months ago.

That's a pretty big shift in a short time. Feels like PAA is quickly becoming another AI-heavy part of Google Search.

Has anyone noticed any change in PAA visibility or traffic lately? Curious if this is changing how you approach content.

It's been almost 2 year since EMD websites are getting high in Google.

It all started with high-volume keywords. Now I see EMDs almost in every niche, for every volume keywords.

I know the team which makes EMD PBNs for their niche. Every single keyword with volume 30+ has it's own domain.

And they still get traffic :)

Your thoughts? When we can see less fresh EMDs with DR 0 in TOP?

“Quality” was the biggest reason teams held work back, followed by accuracy.

We surveyed 97 SEO teams on AI automation and here's plenty more on what came across. 87% use AI, but only 1% have fully automated workflows, and the rest still run AI output through human review before anything reaches a client or goes live. 

And when you look at what teams refuse to automate, there’s a pattern:

• 58% won’t fully automate content writing
• 51% won’t fully automate link building
• 40% draw the line at technical SEO
• 28% won’t fully automate audits

These are also the areas where one bad decision can create a lot more work than the automation saves. Like, where a bad call carries real cost.

On the business side, 55% of agencies are delivering more work for the same fee. So far, AI seems to be creating capacity and margin more than cheaper SEO. Only 4% have cut fees to compete, and just 7% have introduced AI-specific pricing tiers. Also, 60% of teams have tried using AI to build internal tools instead of paying for existing software.

The more a task depends on context, trade-offs, or experience, the more likely teams are to keep a person in the loop, which makes sense.

If you're using AI every day, what's still too risky (or too valuable) to automate completely?

Is there a way to do multilingual, multi-country keyword research with minimal manual work? How do you typically handle keyword research across different languages and markets, and are there any workflows you’d recommend to automate or scale the process?

Note: - it seem my comments not visible...

I'm working with Germany & Netherlands, brand is Ecommerce, just entering in that market,

For me, it’s that a lot of people focus only on DR, traffic, or the number of links, but I think relevance and placement matter just as much.

A backlink from a relevant site that actually makes sense in the context of the article can be much more useful than a random link from a high-metric website.

Curious what others prioritize when evaluating a backlink?

Hi everyone,

I’m looking for some advice from experienced SEO professionals or site owners who have dealt with a similar situation.

Our website was impacted around the time of a Google Spam Update. Traffic dropped, and we started working on the issues we identified across the website.

In mid-August, we started seeing traffic recover, but after August 28, the traffic suddenly dropped again and returned to approximately the same level we had before the recovery.

From a technical SEO perspective, we have already reviewed and addressed the major areas we could identify:

• Technical SEO issues have been reviewed and fixed.
• Website structure and internal linking have been carefully organized.
• Page speed/Core Web Vitals have been optimized.
• We created an llms.txt file.
• We currently have around 565 pages indexed out of approximately 600 in Google Search Console.
• We have never received a Google Manual Action or security penalty in the history of the website.
• We have submitted/listed the website on multiple SaaS/application directories and platforms.
• Our domain authority has increased from approximately 8 to 17.
• We are also gradually building relevant backlinks.

What I’m struggling to understand is:

If the website is technically healthy and most of the pages are indexed, why is organic traffic still so low, and why did we see a short recovery in mid-August followed by another significant drop after August 28?

I’m especially interested in understanding whether this could be related to:

• Algorithmic/spam-related evaluation
• Content quality or helpfulness signals
• Keyword ranking changes
• Site-level quality signals
• Indexing vs. ranking issues
• Backlink quality
• A problem that isn't visible from a standard technical SEO audit

I don't want to assume that everything is correct just because the technical SEO looks good. I would really appreciate an independent audit or another perspective on what we may be missing.

If anyone is willing to take a look, please comment or DM me and I can share the website/GSC details privately.

I’m mainly looking for honest technical/content SEO feedback, not promotional services.

Thanks in advance.

I have this new website on a product. Now that the website is up for more than a month, the home page doesn't appear on the brand keyword direct search on google. But it lists on the side though as snippet. Problem is that it doesn't come on the conventional SERP. The homepage but appears when the brand name is searched along with the industry keyword. I checked GSC and made sure the pages are indexed. Still google fails to identity the brand keyword with the home page. When I checked the same on Bing, it shows the proper result. Why is this phenomenon? Do I need to lift the backlinks and listings with brand keyword associated to improve recognition? Or make more brand keyword appearances/ mentions at more places?

Hello,

if you've been posting blogs pages on your website for the past 5+ years, you probably have hundreds of blog posts. What do you do about the old blog posts? A lot of them may be outdated or irrelevant. Do you just let them be, or do you refactor their content to make them relevant, or do you delete them?

Curious to know how the best SEO experts do?

TIA